"Kingsley, Florence Morse - At the End Of His Rope" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kingsley Florence Morse)

and four followed with disheartening unanimity, during intervals plainly
occupied in a frantic search for drier material.
"If you only had some paper," ventured a timid voice out of the darkness.
"Of course! Thank heaven you reminded me before I struck that last half match!"
Another moment, and a score of closely written pages treating learnedly of the
coleoptera and arachnida of the great northern wilderness were blazing merrily
in the midst of a skilfully constructed pile of twigs and branches.
"Wasn't it fortunate you happened to have that paper?" observed Miss Terrill, as
she leaned forward to warm her chilled fingers at the now thoroughly established
fire.
"Fortunate!" echoed John Gearing, dropping his specimen-box as he stooped to lay
another stick on the fire— whereat the scarlet-headed arachnid and the
coleoptera, one and all, wriggled out and away with joyful haste. "It was by all
odds the most fortunate thing I know of."
"Perhaps you will think me a coward," began the girl, after a prolonged pause
which the raindrops filled with a soft, insistent murmur. "Do you think it would
be very wrong for me— that is, for you—" She turned her head away from the
searching firelight as she continued in so low a voice that John Gearing was
forced to bend his tall head to listen— "if they find us? You said they would
search for us?"
"They will search for us— certainly, and find us."
"If they know— that is, if you— if— I must tell them that I took the spool to to
find you, I could not face them— I could not bear it!"
"Ah, but the fact is that I found you!" said John Gearing in his deepest voice.
"Yes— but— the spools!"
The bug-hunter leaned forward and deliberately dropped a full half dozen of them
into the red heart of the fire.
"There are no spools," he said calmly.
A more unpleasant spot than the virgin forest of the Adirondacks on a wet night
it would be difficult to find. Mr. Percy Algernon Smith put this fact more
forcibly; he said— But why repeat the words of a man who has forced his way
through some six or eight miles of soaking coves, pursued all the way by
jubilant throngs of mosquitoes— his energies being still further taxed by
laborious and systematic performance on a big tin horn?
"I say, Jake," he bawled, pausing after a succession of ear-splitting blasts,
"d'ye hear anything?"
The guide nodded, "To the west on us," he said, jerking his thumb over his
shoulder. "'Tain't fur, neither."
The sagacious reader has already divined that this is only the beginning of the
story. Its ending was after the old, old fashion, of which wise people the world
over never grow tired, and which in truth is the end— or the beginning— of every
story that is at all worth the telling. In this place it must be set down in
just four words— afterward they were married.
It was my good fortune, not many months later, to hear Mrs. John Gearing relate
the above romantic circumstances, which she did with the prettiest smiles and
blushes imaginable.
In closing she declared solemnly that never in all the course of her existence
had such a welcome, glad, cheerful, happy, enlivening, and altogether delightful
vision greeted her eyes as the round, freckled face of "Cinnamon" Smith as he
burst through the dripping branches on that rainy August night.