The Courage of Marge ODoone

The Courage of Marge O'Doone

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Title: The Courage of Marge O'Doone
Author: James Oliver Curwood
Illustrator: Lester Ralph
Release Date: February 10, 2006 [EBook #17745]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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COURAGE OF MARGE O'DOONE ***

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[Illustration: Against that savage background of mountain and gorge
she stood out clear-cut as a cameo, slender as a reed; wild, palpitating,
beautiful. She was more than a picture. She was Life.]

THE COURAGE OF MARGE O'DOONE
BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
FRONTISPIECE BY LESTER RALPH
PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY FOR P. F.
COLLIER & SON COMPANY NEW YORK 1925
* * * * *
Copyright, 1918, by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE
PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY EVERY WEEK CORPORATION, UNDER
THE TITLE "THE GIRL BEYOND THE TRAIL"
* * * * *

THE COURAGE OF MARGE O'DOONE

CHAPTER I
If you had stood there in the edge of the bleak spruce forest, with the
wind moaning dismally through the twisting trees--midnight of deep
December--the Transcontinental would have looked like a thing of fire;
dull fire, glowing with a smouldering warmth, but of strange
ghostliness and out of place. It was a weird shadow, helpless and
without motion, and black as the half-Arctic night save for the band of
illumination that cut it in twain from the first coach to the last, with a
space like an inky hyphen where the baggage car lay. Out of the North

came armies of snow-laden clouds that scudded just above the earth,
and with these clouds came now and then a shrieking mockery of wind
to taunt this stricken creation of man and the creatures it sheltered--men
and women who had begun to shiver, and whose tense white faces
stared with increasing anxiety into the mysterious darkness of the night
that hung like a sable curtain ten feet from the car windows.
For three hours those faces had peered out into the night. Many of the
prisoners in the snowbound coaches had enjoyed the experience
somewhat at first, for there is pleasing and indefinable thrill to
unexpected adventure, and this, for a brief spell, had been adventure de
luxe. There had been warmth and light, men's laughter, women's voices,
and children's play. But the loudest jester among the men was now
silent, huddled deep in his great coat; and the young woman who had
clapped her hands in silly ecstasy when it was announced that the train
was snowbound was weeping and shivering by turns. It was cold--so
cold that the snow which came sweeping and swirling with the wind
was like granite-dust; it clicked, clicked, clicked against the glass--a
bombardment of untold billions of infinitesimal projectiles fighting to
break in. In the edge of the forest it was probably forty degrees below
zero. Within the coaches there still remained some little warmth. The
burning lamps radiated it and the presence of many people added to it.
But it was cold, and growing colder. A gray coating of congealed
breath covered the car windows. A few men had given their outer coats
to women and children. These men looked most frequently at their
watches. The adventure de luxe was becoming serious.
For the twentieth time a passing train-man was asked the same
question.
"The good Lord only knows," he growled down into the face of the
young woman whose prettiness would have enticed the most chivalrous
attention from him earlier in the evening. "Engine and tender been gone
three hours and the divisional point only twenty miles up the line.
Should have been back with help long ago. Hell, ain't it?"
The young woman did not reply, but her round mouth formed a quick
and silent approbation of his final remark.

"Three hours!" the train-man continued his growling as he went on with
his lantern. "That's the hell o' railroading it along the edge of the Arctic.
When you git snowed in you're snowed in, an' there ain't no two ways
about it!"
He paused at the smoking compartment, thrust in his head for a
moment, passed on and slammed the door of the car after him as he
went into the next coach.
In that smoking compartment there were two men, facing each other
across the narrow space between the two seats. They