Spencer's Mountain Read Online Free PDF

predictable.
    Each of the children was small of bone and lean. Some of them were freckled and some were not and some had the brown eyes of their father and some had their mother’s green eyes, but on each of them there was some stamp of grace of build and movement, and it was this Clay voiced when he said, as he often did, “Every one of my babies is a thoroughbred.”
    They were assembled at a table nine feet long. Clay had built it himself, and it was flanked on each side by wooden benches. There was ample room at the table for all the children and even room left over; friends or relatives who happened to drop in around mealtime were sincerely welcomed. During the summer hardly a meal went by when, squeezed in among the Spencer children, there weren’t two or three of the neighboring children taking advantage of the Spencers’ sprawling hospitality, however frugal their means.
    â€œLook at them babies,” said Clay. “You ever in your life see anything prettier than that?”
    Olivia looked up from the pan where she was frying eggs to each individual’s liking and said, “I wish I could keep ’em that way. If I had my wish in this world my children would never grow up. I’d just keep ’em little the rest of their lives.”
    â€œI remember one time when I was a little old tadpole boy,” said Clay, “I had this little baby duck. Mama’s got a picture of me somewhere holden that duck. I used to think that little web-toed quacker was the prettiest thing I ever laid eyes on. Just hated the day to come for that duck to grow up. One day I got the fool idea that if I’d squeeze that duck hard enough every day I could keep him from growen, so every mornen I’d nearly squeeze the tar out of him. One mornen I squeezed him too hard I reckon, because he up and died, but it taught me somethen. You try to keep a thing from growen and it’ll die on you.”
    â€œStill I hate to see my children grow up and leave me,” said Olivia. “You just never know what’s goen to become of ’em.”
    â€œMy babies will turn out all right,” said Clay. “They’re thoroughbreds.” He looked over his brood fondly and when his eyes met Clay-Boy’s, he said, “I’m goen to work on the house this mornen, son. I want you to help me.”
    â€œAll right, Daddy,” replied Clay-Boy.
    The house was not really a house but a dream Clay had. It was his dream to build a house with his own hands, a house his wife and children could see being constructed, a house that would give strength and love to their own lives because they had seen the strength and love with which it was built. He had promised the house to Olivia on their wedding night and had shown her where he would build it, on the summit of Spencer’s Mountain in the same spot where his mother and father’s old cabin had long since rotted away.
    The site was important because it had a history. In 1650 two gentlemen of the Tidewater, Abraham Wood and Edward Bland, seeking a new fur-trading field, had made a journey of exploration into the western mountains. A member of the party, Benjamin Clayton Spencer, came upon a mountainwhere the earth teemed with richness and which was filled with all manner of game. On the summit he built a small lean-to and returned there the following spring with his wife and children to make it his home. From that time the mountain had been family property and was known as Spencer’s Mountain.
    Clay’s father, Zebulon, had brought his bride, Elizabeth, to the mountain when they were married, and there they raised their family and tended their crops as generations of their people had before them. Zebulon and Elizabeth were people of the mountains, and events in the outside world mattered little to them. They received little news or none at all unless an itinerant preacher stumbled into the settlement, exchanging sermons for food, or