A Selection from Fiction Books

A selection from fiction books

At their feet opened a canyon so grand, they knew of nothing with which to compare it. A mile deep, mile upon mile across, with a tiny ribbon of river wandering at the bottom, its walls were multicolored, shimmering with gold and red and blue and dancing green. Lovely trees, bent from the wind, adorned its rim and sometimes down the sides, so far away they were. And as the afternoon sun moved across the deep gash of the canyon, it threw shadows upon pinnacles far below, and new colors emerged as if some great power were redecorating what was already a masterpiece.

In no way did this daunt Damian, for looking about, he found a small stick with which he began to hit the mule lightly about the head. The blows did not hurt, but the animal did not like them and drew back in small mincing steps, whereupon Damian danced after him. In time he tamed the animal enough so that he could mount, but the caravan had not even started when the mule leaned forward, planted its two feet like stone

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pillars, and tossed Damian over its head.

They had been on their way only two days, heading for the Brazos river, when Yancey saw an alligator, huge and menacing, lurking on the bank of a small stream. Its ugly jaws, locked but with teeth showing, seemed capable of biting a man in half; its bumpy hide glistened menacingly in the sun.

To the colonel's disgust with himself for having ignored a basic rule, that night a winter storm of huge dimension struck, and by morning the Neches was a torrent which raged for seven days.

That night Sylvester died in his sleep. . . the night of the day of the Feast of the Dead. He would have said it was an appropriate time to die. Then the enormity of what he had said swept over me and I would not think of it. I wanted to sit still and listen to the quiet of the house, the sudden distant sound of the gongs from the hillside. I sat beside him and thought back over the past, of the first time we had met and how I had feared that my mother

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and I would be turned away. In his silence I believed him to be asleep. There was sorrow but I learned to control it and the Chinese say that the more talents are exercised the more they will develop. I had become not only a widow but a rich woman.

They were symbols of things in life to come. Inside the box lay all the accouterments of another life. In its kind-covered depths was all the equipment of an entirely different world. They represented the future in which she would some day live. For a few moments she saw herself in that future, her red-brown hair in curls, over her shoulders a white silk shawl with roses in the corners, its folds held together with a lavender breastpin. Lovely ladies and courtly men were clapping their hands. She smiled at them and waved.

He had been raised by his Tennessee father to speak rather good English, but after the death of his parents his association with the rude soldiers of the revolution had encouraged him to acquire their informal

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speech habits, so that now his sentences were colorfully ungrammatical and his words those of the barnyard and ranch. But he spoke with marked effectiveness, often and loud. As a verified hero of the battle in which Texas had won her freedom, he felt himself entitled, and sometimes obligated, to express his opinion on almost everything, but he did so with such an attractive mixture of gravity and wit that he did not offend. He was, in this rural setting, a man of substance.

A new minister and his wife came to the growing town that fall and made a round of calls among the country folk. They were Vermont people. The Reverend Ezra Whitman was dignified, pompous, a little pedantic. Mrs. Whitman was refined, soft-spoken, a graduate of a girls' seminary. She took a great interest in Abbie, so that the young teacher began going into town to see her. She found that Mrs. Whitman was something of an artist. The little new frame house in which the couple lived held several oil paint

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Genres:

Action

Adventure

Comedy

Drama

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