With Endless Sight by Allison Pittman

Author:Allison Pittman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Western & Frontier, Historical Fiction, Genre Fiction, Religious & Inspirational Fiction, Romance, Christian Fiction, Historical, Religion & Spirituality, United States, Christian Books & Bibles, Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 9780307561442
Publisher: Multnomah Books
Published: 2010-05-27T04:00:00+00:00

15

I’d grown up on stories of enchanted cottages tucked away in deep, dark forests where innocent girls were lured to their doom. When I was ill as a child, Mother would sit by my bedside and read them to me for hours on end, holding my Brothers Grimm book at an angle so I could see the illustrations of wide-eyed children huddled behind woodpiles as they outwitted ogres. In the days that I languished in and out of fevered sleep, Phoebe did much the same for me. The only difference was that, in her stories, the heroes weren’t anonymous princes or woodcutters, but Del and Chester, riding to great adventures in the Wyoming wilderness. She told tales of their imagined exploits, making them ford raging rivers or pull children out of raging fires. They battled Indians, foiled bank robbers, or found rocks of gold littering the beds of mountain streams.

The climax of each yarn was the dramatic rescue of us. If Laurent happened to be listening, Phoebe took great delight in narrating a violent confrontation wherein Del held Laurent at gunpoint while Chester swooped me up in his arms and carried me out of the cabin and down the mountain where a stagecoach was waiting to take us back to Belleville.

“Chester doesn’t carry you?” I asked once, managing a faint smile.

“You’re smaller. And sick.” Then she leaned closer. “Besides, he can swoop me all he wants later.”

This made me laugh, just a little, but enough to send me into a coughing spasm that threatened to split my head open. Even Laurent, sitting at the table drinking coffee, smiled and shook his head before getting up and walking outside.

He left us alone quite a bit—sometimes for hours—once coming back with a rabbit he’d trapped. For the rest of the afternoon he sat outside on a log next to an open fire while it roasted on a spit. I still hadn’t recovered much of an appetite, so I had just one small piece of the meat shredded into a steaming bowl of bean broth, but I watched as Phoebe and Laurent sat at the table, tearing into it with gusto.

For just a moment, Phoebe forgot her antipathy toward Laurent and complimented his cooking. He smiled and said the secret was in the slow turning of the spit. And I, in that moment, escaped the circumstances that brought us all together and took three breaths of perfect peace.

On the fourth night I woke up drowning. Freezing cold, surrounded by total blackness. Soaking wet.

Phoebe had told me earlier that day about the mountain lake just over a ridge behind the cabin. It was a steep climb down to it, she’d said, but at the bottom was a giant pooling of melted snow, the clearest and cleanest water she’d ever seen. So this, finally, was how Laurent was going to dispose of us. After a prisoner’s final meal of roast rabbit, we were simply tumbled over the ledge, left to sink, suffocating, to the bottom.

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