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Hidden Creek (1920)

by Katharine Newlin Burt

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1111,711,848None5
Hidden Creek begins with a daughter beside her dying father. "Just before his death, Marcus Arundel, artist and father of Sheila, bore witness to his faith in God and man. He had been lying apparently unconscious, his slow, difficult breath drawn at longer and longer intervals. Sheila was huddled on the floor beside his bed, her hand pressing his urgently in the pitiful attempt, common to human love, to hold back the resolute soul from the next step in its adventure. The nurse, who came in by the day, had left a paper of instructions on the table. Here a candle burned under a yellow shade, throwing a circle of warm, unsteady light on the head of the girl, on the two hands, on the rumpled coverlet, on the dying face. This circle of light seemed to collect these things, to choose them, as though for the expression of some meaning. It felt for them as an artist feels for his composition and gave to them a symbolic value. The two hands were in the center of the glow--the long, pale, slack one, the small, desperate, clinging one. The conscious and the unconscious, life and death, humanity and God--all that is mysterious and tragic seemed to find expression there in the two hands."… (more)
AF (1) cover (1) HC (1) hgbrd2016 (1) Kindle (1) PB (1) pre-1950 (1) western (2)
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» See also 5 mentions

The power of descriptive language doesn't come to the fore until the characters have broken away from their accustomed lives. The second half of the book is full of inspirational phrasings.
I'm glad I read this again.
  2wonderY | Mar 3, 2012 |
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Dedication
To Maxwell Struthers Burt who blazed the trail
First words
Just before his death, Marcus Arundel, artist and father of Sheila, bore witness to his faith in God and man.
Quotations
Below, there began to be an extraordinary view of the golden country with its orange mesas and its dark, purple rim of mountains. Millings was a tiny circle of square pebbles, something built up by children in their play. The awful impersonalities of sky and earth swept away its small human importance. Thatcher's larkspur-colored eyes absorbed serenity. They had drawn their color and their far-sighted clearness from such long contemplations of distant horizon lines.
The eyes with which he had overcome her smile were the hard eyes of a man. Sheila's contempt had fallen upon him like a flame. In a few dreadful minutes as he stood there it burnt up a part of his childishness. (Dickie)
...and yet his aquiline face was not the face of a patient man. It was young in a keen, hard fashion; the mouth and eyes were those of a Spanish-American mother, golden eyes and a mouth originally beautiful, soft and cruel, which had been tightened and straightened by a man's will and experience. It had been used so often for careless humorous smiling that the cruelty had been almost worked out of it. (Cosme)
She sat at the foot of the long table, opposite Mr. Lander, a fat, sly-looking man whose eyes twinkled with a look of mysterious inner amusement, caused, probably, by astonishment at his own respectability. He had behind him a career of unprecedented villany, and that he should end here at Rusty as the solid and well-considered keeper of the roadhouse was, no doubt, a perpetual tickle to his consciousness.
"I've a feeling that it was Eve who first discovered dust. Very bad job if she did. Think of all the bother we've been going through ever since."
"There!" Sheila triumphed. "To you it's just bother. You're a man. To me it's a form of sport..."
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Hidden Creek begins with a daughter beside her dying father. "Just before his death, Marcus Arundel, artist and father of Sheila, bore witness to his faith in God and man. He had been lying apparently unconscious, his slow, difficult breath drawn at longer and longer intervals. Sheila was huddled on the floor beside his bed, her hand pressing his urgently in the pitiful attempt, common to human love, to hold back the resolute soul from the next step in its adventure. The nurse, who came in by the day, had left a paper of instructions on the table. Here a candle burned under a yellow shade, throwing a circle of warm, unsteady light on the head of the girl, on the two hands, on the rumpled coverlet, on the dying face. This circle of light seemed to collect these things, to choose them, as though for the expression of some meaning. It felt for them as an artist feels for his composition and gave to them a symbolic value. The two hands were in the center of the glow--the long, pale, slack one, the small, desperate, clinging one. The conscious and the unconscious, life and death, humanity and God--all that is mysterious and tragic seemed to find expression there in the two hands."

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Sheila is orphaned and left friendless and destitute in the first pages. She accepts the invitation of Sylvester Hudson, to come out west to Millings to work for him in his tavern. His family, townspeople and patrons all have strong reactions to the addition of this mysterious willowy lovely to their midst.
When she realizes the reputation she has acquired, she flees to the mountainous extremes of the frontier and struggles to survive the winter.

Meanwhile, Dickie flees his father's cruelties and searches for Sheila in New York City and discovers his talents.
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