The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of ColoradoBrady, Cyrus Townsend
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The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of Colorado
Brady, Cyrus Townsend
Colorado -- Fiction; Love stories; Western stories
The cabin contained a large and a small room. In the wall between them
there was a doorway closed by an ordinary batten door with a wooden
latch and no lock. Closed it served to hide the occupant of one room
from the view of the other, otherwise it was but a feeble barrier. Even
had it possessed a lock, a vigorous man could have burst it through in a
moment.
These thoughts did not come very clearly to Enid Maitland. Few thoughts
of any kind came to her. Where she lay she could see plainly the dancing
light of the glorious fire. She was warm; the deftly wrapped bandage,
the healing lotion upon her foot, had greatly relieved the pain in that
wounded member. The bed was hard but comfortable, much more so than the
sleeping bags to which of late she had been accustomed.
Few women had gone through such experiences mental and physical as had
befallen her within the last few hours and lived to tell the story. Had
it not been for the exhaustive strains of body and spirit to which she
had been subjected, her mental faculties would have been on the alert
and the strangeness of her unique position would have made her so
nervous that she could not have slept.
For the time being, however, the physical demands upon her entity were
paramount. She was dry, she was warm, she was fed, she was free from
anxiety and she was absolutely unutterably weary. Her thoughts were
vague, inchoate, unconcentrated. The fire wavered before her eyes, she
closed them in a few moments and did not open them.
Without a thought, without a care, she fell asleep. Her repose was
complete, not a dream even disturbed the profound slumber into which she
sank. Pretty picture she made; her head thrown backward, her golden hair
roughly dried and quickly plaited in long braids, one of which fell
along the pillow while the other curled lovingly around her neck. Her
face in the natural light would have looked pallid from what she had
gone through, but the fire cast red glows upon it; the fitful light
flickered across her countenance and sometimes the color wavered, it
came and went as if in consciousness; and sometimes deep shadows
unrelieved accentuated the paleness born of her sufferings.
There is no light that plays so many tricks with the imagination, or
that so stimulates the fancy as the light of an open fire. In its sudden
outbursts it sometimes seems to add life touches to the sleeping and the
dead. Had there been any eye to see this girl, she would have made a
delightful picture in the warm glow from the stone hearth. There were no
eyes to look, however, save those which belonged to the man on the other
side of the door.
On the hither side of that door in the room where the fire burned on the
hearth, there was rest in the heart of the woman, on the farther side
where the fire only burned in the heart of the man, there was tumult.
Not outward and visible, but inward and spiritual, and yet there was no
lack of apparent manifestation of the turmoil in the man's soul.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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