The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Country Beyond, by James Oliver Curwood

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Title: The Country Beyond
A Romance of the Wilderness

Author: James Oliver Curwood

Illustrator: Walt Louderback

Release Date: July 14, 2009 [EBook #29406]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COUNTRY BEYOND ***

Thanks to Al Haines, based on the
non-illustrated version, at
www.gutenberg.org/etext/4743

Thanks to Robert Rowe, Dianne Bean, Charles Franks and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

[Frontispiece: "We'll make it, Peter," she whispered.]

THE COUNTRY BEYOND

A ROMANCE OF THE WILDERNESS

BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

AUTHOR OF THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN, THE FLAMING FOREST, ETC.

JTABLE 5 23 1

List of Illustrations

"We'll make it, Peter," she whispered. . . . . . . _Frontispiece_

"I've come to tell you things, Nada. I've been living a lie."

They hurried to the camp, the children racing ahead to tell the news.

"--a squaw named Yellow Bird sent word that you would be welcome."

_A glass of wine once lost a kingdom, a nail turned the tide of a mighty
battle, and a woman's smile once upon a time destroyed the homes of a
million people. Thus have trivial things played their potent parts in
the history of human lives; yet these things Peter did not know._

THE COUNTRY BEYOND

CHAPTER I

Not far from the rugged and storm-whipped north shore of Lake Superior,
and south of the Kaministiqua, yet not as far south as the Rainy River
waterway, there lay a paradise lost in the heart of a wilderness
world--and in that paradise "a little corner of hell."

That was what the girl had called it once upon a time, when sobbing out
the shame and the agony of it to herself. That was before Peter had
come to leaven the drab of her life. But the hell was still there.

One would not have guessed its existence, standing at the bald top of
Cragg's Ridge this wonderful thirtieth day of May. In the whiteness of
winter one could look off over a hundred square miles of freezing
forest and swamp and river country, with the gleam of ice-covered lakes
here