Penny Dreadfuls, 1890 · page 42 of 233
That Girl of Johnson's — page 42: what you’re looking at
A restored page from Penny Dreadfuls, 1890. Page through the whole issue in the reader above.
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4 ig * (eo Ve r. wl ¢s °s) ee 4 eeidted bis Let, SA Re L.4ui- as y T= / J - THAT GIRL OF JOHNSON’S, _ ol educated people there. It wasa different world shut off from the settlement by the silent, towering mountain. In all the twenty years of her life Dolores had never been over the mountain; what lay beyond it she did not know except from the rumors that drifted into them from the men who had been there—men who had strayed in hunt- ing, going around to the opposite mountain and returning across the town. | Sometimes when the atmosphere was heavy and the wind in the right direction, the smoke from the tall factory chimneys drifted around to the settlement and tangled in the pines like gray specters waving their shadowy banners above the scattered houses down toward the valley. In the minds of the villagers a superstitious fear was attached to these fluttering shreds of gray. They boded ill for those who saw them; death or sorrow lurked in their folds, as though the evil spirits in the town came over the mountain to harm them with their restlessness. Many a time Dolores had watched these smoke wreaths, and her mind had gone to the place from whence they came, and she wove from them fantastic shadows born of dreams, and she clothed them in garments ofthe living, and they brought her many fancies of the life pulsing just beyond the piny peaks. Now her mind was filled with the one subject so much discussed; she turned it over and over, viewing it on all sides ; now reasoning with herself as to this or that possi- bility, this or that decision, but eventually returning to the first conclusion which was to her so convincing that it sent her over the mountain to the town to discover if possible the truth, and at the court was the place to learn what she wished to know—if there were any place to learn it ere the whole world should know. Going over the mountain meant little to her in itself. That it would affect her life particularly she did not dream; her one thought was to do what lay before her to which she was impelled and return to the old life again, cS ((e) (e(oy nn) evevo)