The Girl from Montana. Grace Livingston Hill

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       Grace Livingston Hill

      The Girl from Montana

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664122339

Table of Contents

       CHAPTER I

       THE GIRL, AND A GREAT PERIL

       CHAPTER II

       THE FLIGHT

       CHAPTER III

       THE PURSUIT

       CHAPTER IV

       THE TWO FUGITIVES

       CHAPTER V

       A NIGHT RIDE

       CHAPTER VI

       A CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR MEETING IN THE WILDERNESS

       CHAPTER VII

       BAD NEWS

       CHAPTER VIII

       THE PARTING

       CHAPTER IX

       IN A TRAP

       CHAPTER X

       PHILADELPHIA AT LAST

       CHAPTER XI

       IN FLIGHT AGAIN

       CHAPTER XII

       ELIZABETH'S DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

       CHAPTER XIII

       ANOTHER GRANDMOTHER

       CHAPTER XIV

       IN A NEW WORLD

       CHAPTER XV

       AN EVENTFUL PICNIC

       CHAPTER XVI

       ALONE AGAIN

       CHAPTER XVII

       A FINAL FLIGHT AND PURSUIT

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

THE GIRL, AND A GREAT PERIL

       Table of Contents

      The late afternoon sun was streaming in across the cabin floor as the girl stole around the corner and looked cautiously in at the door.

      There was a kind of tremulous courage in her face. She had a duty to perform, and she was resolved to do it without delay. She shaded her eyes with her hand from the glare of the sun, set a firm foot upon the threshold, and, with one wild glance around to see whether all was as she had left it, entered her home and stood for a moment shuddering in the middle of the floor.

      A long procession of funerals seemed to come out of the past and meet her eye as she looked about upon the signs of the primitive, unhallowed one which had just gone out from there a little while before.

      The girl closed her eyes, and pressed their hot, dry lids hard with her cold fingers; but the vision was clearer even than with her eyes open.

      She could see the tiny baby sister lying there in the middle of the room, so little and white and pitiful; and her handsome, careless father sitting at the head of the rude home-made coffin, sober for the moment; and her tired, disheartened mother, faded before her time, dry-eyed and haggard, beside him. But that was long ago, almost at the beginning of things for the girl.

      There had been other funerals, the little brother who had been drowned while playing in a forbidden stream, and the older brother who had gone off in search of gold or his own way, and had crawled back parched with fever to die in his mother's arms. But those, too, seemed long ago to the girl as she stood in the empty cabin and looked fearfully about her. They seemed almost blotted out by the last three that had crowded so close within the year. The father, who even at his worst had a kind word for her and her mother, had been brought home mortally hurt—an encounter with wild cattle, a fall from his horse in a treacherous place—and had never roused to consciousness again.

      At all these funerals there had been a solemn service, conducted by a travelling preacher when one happened to be within reach, and, when there was none, by the trembling, determined, untaught lips of the white-faced mother. The mother had always insisted upon it, especially upon a prayer. It had seemed like a charm to help the departed one into some kind of a pitiful heaven.

      And when, a few months after the father, the mother had drooped and grown whiter and whiter, till one day she clutched at her heart and lay down gasping, and said: "Good-by, Bess! Mother's good girl! Don't forget!" and was gone from her life of burden and disappointment forever, the girl had prepared