The Project Gutenberg eBook, The White Desert, by Courtney Ryley Cooper,
Illustrated by Anton Otto Fischer

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Title: The White Desert

Author: Courtney Ryley Cooper

Release Date: December 21, 2006 [eBook #20155]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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THE WHITE DESERT

by

COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER

Author of
The Cross-Cut, Etc.

Frontispiece by Anton Otto Fischer

[Frontispiece: It was easier to accept the more precipitous journey,
straight downward.]

Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers ---------- New York
Copyright, 1922,
by Little, Brown, And Company
All Rights Reserved
Published February, 1922
Reprinted March, 1922

To a Certain Little Gray Lady

who seems to like everything

I write, the main reason being

the fact that she is

MY MOTHER

THE WHITE DESERT

CHAPTER I

It was early afternoon. Near by, the smaller hills shimmered in the
radiant warmth of late spring, the brownness of their foliage and
boulders merging gradually upward to the green of the spruces and pines
of the higher mountains, which in turn gave way before the somber
blacks and whites of the main range, where yet the snow lingered from
the clutch of winter, where the streams ran brown with the down-flow of
the continental divide, where every cluster of mountain foliage
sheltered a mound of white, in jealous conflict with the sun. The
mountains are tenacious of their vicious traits; they cling to the snow
and cold and ice long after the seasons have denoted a time of warmth
and summer's splendor; the columbine often blooms beside a ten-foot
drift.

But down in the hollow which shielded the scrambling little town of
Dominion, the air was warm and lazy with the friendliness of May. Far
off, along the course