Swamp Angel Read Online Free PDF Page B

curves on the sides and rumps of hills and mountains growing ever nearer, ever higher, until at Hell’s Gate Canyon the close rocks of the river banks confine the raging waters – and further west until the first sagebrush is seen. On goes the road to Kamloops and beyond.
    For a long time past the word at the back of Maggie’s mind, and at the end of her plan and her journey, had been Kamloops.
    The second road, which branches at Hope, turns to the right, that is, south of the Cariboo Road and nearer to the American border. It follows the Hope-Princeton Trail (historic trail of miners and cattlemen) which is now the Hope-Princeton Highway, climbing into the mountains. Here are many streams, and the Coquihalla River, the young Skagit River, and at last the Similkameen River. The Hope-Princeton Highway, like the Cariboo Highway, moves into BritishColumbia’s heart. It leads to a mining country, and orchard countries, past lakes, rivers and mountains into the Boundary Country fabulous with mines, with old ghost towns, with thriving communities divided by mountains and forests and waterfalling rivers, and to and beyond the mighty and mysterious concentration at Trail. This was the road that Maggie chose, at least as far as the river with the dancing name Similkameen. Then she would turn her back on what lay beyond, return to Hope and follow, somehow, the road to Kamloops.
    She was so far now from what she had left behind her on Capitol Hill that she had no fear of being overtaken. Make no mistake, when you have reached Hope and the roads that divide there you have quite left Vancouver and the Pacific Ocean. They are disproportionately remote. You are entering a continent, and you meet the continent there, at Hope.
    If at any time now, Maggie thought, she should by some ridiculous calculation or miscalculation be overtaken and confronted by Edward Vardoe, she would not mind. She was Tom Lloyd’s own widow again. She would not hide nor be afraid. She would not protest, upbraid, defend. She grieved a little, and helplessly, because (she thought) another woman would have done this thing better. Another woman would have faced Eddie Vardoe and told him that she could not live with him any longer. She would have left him more fairly, Maggie thought. Maggie had to go almost under his very eyes, or she would have involved her friends. She, Maggie, could not have borne the small scenes and the big scenes and the pursuit and the shoutings if she had quite faced him. She had borne the humiliations that she had borne, but she could not endure the others. He would never have let me be, she said to herself with revulsion; he would have given Hilda and her mother no peace; I know him so well. He is he, and I am I. And this wasthe only way for me. On a shining morning she waited for the Hope-Princeton bus at Chilliwack. She settled down beside a window.
    When she first saw the Similkameen River, the dancing river with the dancing name, it was a broad mountain stream of a light blue that was silver in the bright morning, and of a silver that was blue. There was a turn in the road, and crowded somber jack pines hid the Similkameen River. There was another turn, and the river flowed laughing beside the road again. Across the rapid moving river was the forest of lodgepole pine. Shafts of sunlight smote the first trees and they stood out against the somberness and denseness of the forests behind them. Maggie looked at, but she could not look into the pine forest, for it was sealed in its density and blackness. The Similkameen River, of fairly uniform breadth, ran blue and silver and alive, level and life giving past the forests.
    A sign on the roadside said “Beware of deer crossing the road.” Maggie went forward to the driver. She waited until a stretch of the highway lay clear ahead and then she spoke.
    “Will you set me down, please, somewhere near the river?”
    The driver did not answer at once. His eyes were on the road. Then he said,