Free Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

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    She and her father had come to the mountains six years earlier in hopes of finding relief for the consumption that had slowly worked at Monroe's lungs until he wet a half-dozen handkerchiefs a day with blood. His Charleston doctor, putting all his faith in the powers of cool fresh air and exercise, had recommended a well-known highland resort with a fine dining room and therapeutic mineral hot springs. But Monroe did not relish the idea of a restful quiet place full of the well-to-do and their many afflictions. He instead found a mountain church of his denomination lacking a preacher, reasoning that useful work would be more therapeutic than reeking sulfur water.
    They had set out immediately, traveling by train to Spartanburg, the railhead in the upstate. It was a rough town situated hard up against the wall of the mountains, and they had stayed there several days, living in what passed for a hotel, until Monroe could arrange for muleteers to transport their file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6
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    crated belongings across the Blue Ridge to the village of Cold Mountain. During that time Monroe bought a carriage and a horse to draw it, and he was, as always, lucky in the purchase of things. He happened upon a man just rubbing a shine into the final coat of black lacquer on a new and beautifully built cabriolet. In addition, the man had a strong dappled gelding well matched to the carriage. Monroe bought them both without a moment of haggle, counting out money from his wallet into the yellowy and callused hand of the wainwright. It took several moments, but when he was done Monroe had sporty equipage indeed for a country preacher.
    Thus outfitted, they went on ahead of their things, traveling first to the little town of Brevard, where there was no hotel, only a boardinghouse. They left from there in the blue light of the hour before dawn. It was a fine spring morning, and as they passed through the town Monroe had said, I am told we should be to Cold Mountain by suppertime.
    The gelding seemed pleased to be on a jaunt. He stepped out smartly, pulling the light rig at a thrilling clip, the shiny spokes of its two high wheels buzzing with speed.
    They climbed all through the bright morning. The wagon road was bound tight to left and right by bower and thicket, and it folded back upon itself in an endless succession of switchbacks as it ascended a narrow vale. The blue sky became but a thin cut above the dark slopes. They crossed and recrossed an upper branch of the French Broad and once passed so near a waterfall that the cold spray wet their faces.
    Ada had never seen mountains other than the rocky Alps before and was not sure what to make of this strange and vegetal topography, its every cranny and crag home to some leafy plant foreign to the spare and sandy low country. The spreading tops of oak and chestnut and tulip poplar converged to make a canopy that crowded out the sunlight. Close to the ground, azalea and rhododendron ranked up to make an understory thick as a stone wall.
    Nor was Ada easy in her mind with this land's pitiful and informal roads. So inferior were these rutted tracks to the broad and sandy pikes of the low country that they seemed more the product of roaming cattle than of man. The road decreased in width at every turning until Ada became convinced that the way would soon disappear altogether, leaving them adrift in a wilderness as trackless and profound as that which leapt up when God first spoke the word greenwood.
    Monroe, though, was in high glee for a man so recently hemorrhaging. He looked about as if he had been charged, upon penalty of death, with remembering every fold of terrain and every shade of green. Periodically, he startled the horse by suddenly declaiming lines from Wordsworth in a loud voice. When they rounded a bend and stopped before a distant pale vista of the flat country they had left behind, he hollered, Earth has