Read "The Gilded Chair" by Melville Davisson Post online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
At noon they set out through the mountains, the Marchesa Soderrelli riding the mule, the old man leading with the rope bridle over his arm, and the sack swinging on his shoulder. Caroline Childers walked beside the mountaineer. The Duke followed with the rifle. The world had changed; it was now a land of sun, of peace, of vast unending stillness. The carpet of the wilderness was dry; the dark-green tops of the fir trees brightened as with acid; the far-off stretch of forest, fresh, as though wiped with a cloth; the air like lotus.
The old man traveled along the backbone of the mountain, not as the crow flies, to the coast, but in the great arc of a circle swinging to the west. He thus avoided abrupt and perilous descents and the dense undergrowth of the hollows. The forest along these summits was open. Cyrus Childers had cleaned them of their fallen timber. They were now great groves of fir trees, shooting up their brown bodies into the sky, and stretching there a green, unending trellis through which the sunlight filtered.