Project Gutenberg's The Courage of Marge O'Doone, by James Oliver Curwood
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Courage of Marge O'Doone
Author: James Oliver Curwood
Illustrator: Lester Ralph
Release Date: February 10, 2006 [EBook #17745]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COURAGE OF MARGE O'DOONE ***
Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: Against that savage background of mountain and gorge she
stood out clear-cut as a cameo, slender as a reed; wild, palpitating,
beautiful. She was more than a picture. She was Life.]
THE COURAGE OF MARGE O'DOONE
BY
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
FRONTISPIECE BY
LESTER RALPH
PUBLISHED BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
FOR
P. F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY
NEW YORK
1925
* * * * *
Copyright, 1918, by
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY EVERY WEEK CORPORATION, UNDER THE TITLE
"THE GIRL BEYOND THE TRAIL"
* * * * *
THE COURAGE OF MARGE O'DOONE
CHAPTER I
If you had stood there in the edge of the bleak spruce forest, with the
wind moaning dismally through the twisting trees--midnight of deep
December--the Transcontinental would have looked like a thing of fire;
dull fire, glowing with a smouldering warmth, but of strange ghostliness
and out of place. It was a weird shadow, helpless and without motion,
and black as the half-Arctic night save for the band of illumination
that cut it in twain from the first coach to the last, with a space like
an inky hyphen where the baggage car lay. Out of the North came armies
of snow-laden clouds that scudded just above the earth, and with these
clouds came now and then a shrieking mockery of wind to taunt this
stricken creation of man and the creatures it sheltered--men and women
who had begun to shiver, and whose tense white faces stared with
increasing anxiety into the mysterious darkness of the night that hung
like a sable curtain ten feet from the car windows.
For three hours those
|