ETEXT THE COUNTRY BEYOND ***
Produced by Robert Rowe, Dianne Bean, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE COUNTRY BEYOND
A ROMANCE OF THE WILDERNESS
BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
AUTHOR OF THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN, THE FLAMING FOREST, ETC.
A glass of wine once lost a kingdom, a nail turned the tide of a
mighty battle, and a woman's smile once upon a time destroyed the
homes of a million people. Thus have trivial things played their
potent parts in the history of human lives; yet these things Peter
did not know.
THE COUNTRY BEYOND
CHAPTER I
Not far from the rugged and storm-whipped north shore of Lake
Superior, and south of the Kaministiqua, yet not as far south as
the Rainy River waterway, there lay a paradise lost in the heart
of a wilderness world--and in that paradise "a little corner of
hell."
That was what the girl had called it once upon a time, when
sobbing out the shame and the agony of it to herself. That was
before Peter had come to leaven the drab of her life. But the hell
was still there.
One would not have guessed its existence, standing at the bald top
of Cragg's Ridge this wonderful thirtieth day of May. In the
whiteness of winter one could look off over a hundred square miles
of freezing forest and swamp and river country, with the gleam of
ice-covered lakes here and there, fringed by their black spruce
and cedar and balsam--a country of storm, of deep snows, and men
and women whose blood ran red with the thrill that the hardship
and the never-ending adventure of the wild.
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