The Heart of the Red Firs: A Story of the Pacific NorthwestAnderson, Ada Woodruff
General
The Heart of the Red Firs: A Story of the Pacific Northwest
Anderson, Ada Woodruff
Northwest, Pacific -- Fiction
She gained the summit moist and panting, and paused to look down on the
rowboat, and on across the harbor to the infant city on her hills.
There was no dwelling near; the trail took the contour of the bluff,
which in places became a precipice, and everywhere around her stretched
the forest or the sea. She crossed to the westward side and stopped
where a fallen hemlock had cut a swathe through the timber, creating an
unobstructed view. Out of the smoke film that shrouded the distant
shore, rising columns parted in dun rolling clouds, showing where the
forest fires burned; but the Olympics reared their giant heads from the
pall, sometimes thrusting a shoulder through. And to this woman it was
not solitude; she had come into the presence of old friends. She turned
her eyes to that grand company of peaks and forgot the narrow limits of
the life below the bluff; she stood above the drift and shadow and, for
a moment, Philip.
Her hands were clasped loosely behind her; her lifted head exposed the
beautiful lines of throat and chin; her breath came a little hard and
quick and there was a soft color in her cheeks. The likeness to her
sister had never seemed as marked to Forrest as it was then, when he
came upon her unexpectedly, by the fallen hemlock, on his way to the
mills. Was not this the trail to the headwaters? Had they not paused
to choose a way through the windfall?
She did not see him, and he waited, mastered by that brief illusion.
And while he watched her face she saw the heights of the Olympics change
from rose to burnished brass; every peak and spur flamed a signal to the
departing sun.
"’But breathe the air of mountains
And their unapproachable summits will lift thee
to the level of themselves.’"
She repeated the words softly with a clear modulation, deepening to a
contralto note, and after a moment added a preceding line.
"’Assert thyself; rise up to thy full height.’"
But there she stopped, and lifting her arms with a little outward
gesture, expressive of futile effort, let them drop, and turning her
face, saw Forrest.
He came forward quickly to say, "I’ve only been here a moment, and I
couldn’t help listening; I’m fond of those lines. But, when did you
ever assert yourself?" He looked down at her with his smile of the
eyes. "It’s there the resemblance stops."
"You mean to Alice?"
"Yes, sometimes you are very like her," and he turned his glance to the
mountain-tops.
"You mean physically. I think, in other ways, I must often seem
purposeless, even weak—to you."
"Ob, no," he said quickly, "I couldn’t ever believe that. You are
stronger than most women; strong to endure. But you lack her executive
ability." Then he stopped, for he saw that she had given his words a
personality he had not meant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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