The Angel of Lonesome Hill

The Angel of Lonesome Hill

Project Gutenberg's The Angel of Lonesome Hill, by Frederick Landis
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Title: The Angel of Lonesome Hill
Author: Frederick Landis
Release Date: October, 2005 [EBook #9193] [Yes, we are more than
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Edition: 10
Language: English

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THE ANGEL OF LONESOME HILL A STORY OF A PRESIDENT
by Frederick Landis Author of "The Glory of His Country"
1910
[Illustration: Those who passed by night were grateful for the lamp]
It was a handful of people in the country--a simple-hearted handful.
There was no railroad--only a stage which creaked through the gullies
and was late. Once it had a hot-box, and the place drifted through space,
a vagrant atom.
Time swung on a lazy hinge. Children came; young folks married; old
ones died; Indian Creek overflowed the bottom-land; crops failed; one
by one the stage bore boys and girls away to seek their fortunes in the
far-off world; at long intervals some tragedy streaked the yellow clay
monotony with red; January blew petals from her silver garden; April
poured her vase of life; August crawled her snail length; years passed,
leaving rusty streaks back to a dull horizon.
The sky seemed higher than anywhere else; clouds hurried over this
place called "Cold Friday."
A mile to the east was "Lonesome Hill." Indians once built signal fires
upon it, and in this later time travellers alighted as their horses
struggled up the steep approach. At the top was a cabin; it was
whitewashed, and so were the apple-trees round it. A gourd vine clung
to its chimney; pigeons fluttered upon its shingles, and June flung a
crimson rose mantle over its side and half-way up the roof.
One wished to stop and rest beneath its weeping willow by the white
stone milk house.
Those who passed by day were accustomed to a woman's face at the
window--a calm face which looked on life as evening looks on
day--such a face as one might use to decorate a fancy of the old frontier.

Those who passed by night were grateful for the lamp which protested
against Nature's apparent consecration of the place to solitude.
This home held aloof from "Cold Friday"; many times Curiosity went
in, but Conjecture alone came out, for through the years the man and
woman of this cabin merely said, "We came from back yonder."
Nobody knew where "yonder" was.
But the law of compensation was in force--even in "Cold Friday." With
acquaintanceships as with books, the ecstasy of cutting leaves is not
always sustained in the reading, and the silence of this man and woman
was the life of village wonder.
It gave "Friday's" chimney talk a spice it otherwise had never known;
the back log seldom crumbled into ashes till the bones of these cabin
dwellers lay bleaching on the plains of "Perhaps."
John Dale was seventy-five years or more, but worked his niggard
hillside all the day, and seldom came to town. His aged wife was kind;
the flowers of her life she gave away, but none could glance upon the
garden. She seemed to know when neighbors were ill; hers was the
dignity of being indispensable. Many the mother of that region who,
standing beneath some cloud, thanked God as this slender, white-haired
soul with star shine in her face, hurried over the fields with an old
volume pasted full of quaint remedies.
She made a call of another kind--just once--when the "Hitchenses"
brought the first organ to "Cold Friday."
She remained only long enough to go straight to the cabinet, which the
assembled neighbors regarded with distant awe, and play several pieces
"without the book." On her leaving with the same quiet indifference,
Mrs. Ephraim Fivecoats peered owlishly