A Timeless Place/The San Francisco Earthquake/Wheels/People I Have Loved, Known or Admired/Summer of the Red Wolf [antikvár]

chapter oneICass Fagan stood on the sandstone cliff high above Sutter's Val-Bey where she had stood so many times before. The sun, whieh had melted the snow from the trees and left their branches glisten-ang, was warm on her back. She took off her coat, spread it on the rock and sat down, filled with a sense of peace at the sight of her ivalley, now that her unhappy mood had passed.One never knows how such moods begin; they lie waiting within us for someone to touch ofiF the spark. Perhaps her daughter, Leah, had done so by storming out of the kitchen at breakfast-time with all the righteousness and heartlessness of her seventeen years. It was af ter Leah's outburst that Cass began to think of Steve, far away at war and in constant danger. There had been no letter from her elder son in many days.! Panic arose within her, and when Dan came in, smelling of the cow barn and looking for warmth and laughter, she was barely able to speak. So she thought, I must go out. And she said to the boys, "Let's go for a walk."They pulled their coats down from where they had hung them to dry above the wood stoveMichael, their impatient young son, got caught in the zip of his coat, and Zach Weatherby, Michael's friend, in his coonskin cap and hand-me-down clothes looked like an opossum child emerging from its pouch.