The Project Gutenberg EBook of Who Crosses Storm Mountain?, by
Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

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Title: Who Crosses Storm Mountain?
1911

Author: Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

Release Date: November 19, 2007 [EBook #23551]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHO CROSSES STORM MOUNTAIN? ***

Produced by David Widger

WHO CROSSES STORM MOUNTAIN?

By Charles Egbert Craddock

1911

The wind stirred in the weighted pines; the snow lay on the ground. Here
and there on its smooth, white expanse footprints betokened the woodland
gentry abroad. In the pallid glister of the moon, even amid the sparse,
bluish shadows of the leafless trees, one might discriminate the
impression of the pronged claw of the wild turkey, the short, swift
paces of the mink, the padded, doglike paw of the wolf. A progress of a
yet more ravening suggestion was intimated in great hoof-marks leading
to the door of a little log cabin all a-crouch in the grim grip of
winter and loneliness and poverty on the slope of the mountain, among
heavy, outcropping ledges of rock and beetling, overhanging crags. With
icy ranges all around as far as the eye could reach, with the vast,
instarred, dark sky above, it might seem as if sorrow, the world, the
law could hardly take account of so slight a thing, so remote. But
smoke was slowly stealing up from its stick-and-clay chimney, and its
clapboarded roof sheltered a group with scarcely the heart to mend the
fire.

Two women shivered on the broad hearth before the dispirited embers. One
had wept so profusely that she had much ado to find a dry spot in her
blue-checked apron, thrown over her head, wherewith to mop her tears.
The other, much younger, her fair face reddened, her blue eyes swollen,
her auburn curling hair all tangled on her shoulders, her voice
half-choked with sobs, addressed herself to the narration of their
woes, her cold, listless hands clasped about her knees as she sat on an
inverted bushel-basket, for there was not a whole chair in the room.

"An' then he jes' tuk an' leveled!" she faltered.

A young hunt