The White Hunter by Gilbert Morris

Author:Gilbert Morris
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781441270474
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2006-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jeb Finds a Place

August had brought a searing heat to New York, and the summer of 1912 was one everyone would look back on with awe. On one of those hot Sunday mornings, Annie walked along Washington Street toward Kathleen O’Fallon’s apartment, feeling the heat that seemed to melt her from the inside out. She was wearing a plain brown dress that clung to her, and drawing a damp handkerchief from her pocket, she mopped at her face. Overhead the sun was pasted in the sky like a huge yellow wafer, and even the horses passing her seemed to stagger from the force of the heat.

Passing by a group of children playing stickball despite the glaring sunshine, Annie smiled, thinking, I guess kids would play in any kind of weather—even on the North Pole on top of the ice. Turning down Thirty-second Avenue, a horrible memory of the Titanic going down leaped into her mind, and for a moment she closed her eyes, trying to blot out the scene. She had endured a recurrent series of frightening images of that terrible time, some that would wake her up in the middle of the night, and the few months that had passed since the tragedy had not mitigated the brilliant, flashing images.

The rattle of a riveter’s gun startled her, and she twisted her head abruptly to look up at the towering skeleton of steel—a skyscraper that was rising out of the earth reaching for the sky. Annie shook her head, for she disliked skyscrapers intensely. She had grown up in a place where the eye could rest on distant vistas with nothing but land and trees and sky and clouds. To be buried now in the canyons of New York had grown more unpleasant the longer she stayed. The advent of the skyscraper built of steel frames meant that the windows in the new buildings could be larger, and at night sometimes the glare of the city lights depressed her even more for some reason. She had been reading some of the reformers who viewed the struggle between sunlight and gaslight as being symbolic of the struggle between vice and honesty. One of them, Maxim Gorky, in his visit to New York had said in a speech that Annie had heard: “At first it seems attractive, but in this city when one looks at light enclosed in transparent prisons of glass, one understands that here light, like everything else, is enslaved. It serves gold, it is for gold, and is inimically aloof from people.”

As Annie moved rapidly down the street, the heat of the sidewalk almost like a griddle radiating heat, she thought of how she had spent her time since returning from England. It had been fortunate for her in a way that Kathleen had been in such great need. It was like three babies instead of two, Annie thought with a smile, for Kathleen had not a clue as to what to do with herself. Annie had thrown

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