THE CHRISTMAS BRIDE
© 2012 by Grace Livingston Hill
Print ISBN 978-1-61626-657-8
eBook Editions:
Adobe Digital Edition (.epub) 978-1-62029-076-7
Kindle and MobiPocket Edition (.prc) 978-1-62029-077-4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted for commercial purposes, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without written permission of the publisher.
All scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.
Cover design: Faceout Studio, www.faceoutstudio.com
Published by Barbour Publishing, Inc., P.O. Box 719, Uhrichsville, Ohio 44683, www.barbourbooks.com
Our mission is to publish and distribute inspirational products offering exceptional value and biblical encouragement to the masses
Printed in the United States of America.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
About the Author
Chapter 1
1920s
Eastern United States
Gregory Sterling rode slowly out of town toward his little shack among the hills. He had just come from signing the papers that gave over to the Blue Star Production Company full right and title to the land for which he had grubbed and starved and fought and almost died. He was going back to pack up and leave.
Ten years before, a mere lad with a sore heart and a great determination, Greg had come to the Far West and taken up land, worked hard, and raised a few cattle, striving against great odds year after year. Now suddenly within the last few months, a rich yield of oil had been discovered, and the land that had been so hard to subdue had become worth millions. Actually millions!
Greg said it softly over to himself when he was out on the desert alone: “I’m clearing out! I’m going back east. I’m going home wealthy, just as I said I would!”
He set his grim young lips, gazed wistfully off toward the purple heights of the distant mountains, and sighed.
“But it won’t be home,” he added. “Not with Mother gone. There’ll be nobody there I care about. Nobody left! Not even little Alice Blair!”
He was silent again, reflecting on how his mother had hated to have him going with Alice Blair. And then Alice Blair had run away with Murky Powers. Well, that was that! There wouldn’t even be Alice.
He half closed his eyes and tried to visualize Alice as she had been, a little pink and white and golden wisp of a thing with big blue eyes. Impudent eyes, his mother had called them. He hadn’t thought of her for several years now. He had been grimly set on making a living. And now, before he could have dreamed it possible, while he was still young enough to enjoy it, his fortune had come to him without any effort of his own!
He had never expected this thing. The utmost he had hoped when he first came out to these wilds had been the right to do as he pleased, to hide his stricken young life after the death of his mother, to hide away from people who thought they were elected to manage him, and earn a meager living through hard, daily toil.
Then suddenly in a night he was rich! He was going back! Back to the place where they wouldn’t lend him twenty dollars to start a newsstand down near the station. Back where they wanted him to be apprenticed to learn a trade.
He threw his head back and let out his triumph in a bitter laugh, the lightest that had passed his lips since his mother died and left him, a seventeen-year-old boy, with everybody trying to boss him. Well, now he could buy any house in town, pay twenty dollars for a single newspaper if he chose. Rich!
He laughed again that astonished, mirthless laugh, as if it were somehow a joke on himself.
The thin, old rackabones of a horse he was riding heard that unaccountable laughter, threw his head back in astonishment, and gave a swish to his bobbed tail and a canter or two to express his interest. A squirrel whisked up into a tree and dropped the nut he had been so deftly manipulating, turning his head from side to side, taking in this most phenomenal sound on the wide open spaces. Guns he knew with their whistle of death; swearing he knew, and drunken calls; raucous singing he had heard at nighttime when cattlemen were riding home from a brawl. But this strange, uncertain sound of mirth without joy was new, and there was a desperate wistfulness in it that even a wild creature would sense.
All the way back those monotonous miles to his shack, Greg was staring ahead, not at the desert before him, but at his new life, trying to find a gleam. It must be going to be wonderful, but he felt dazed when he should have been thrilled. He had been thinking so long in terms of cattle and feed and the land and the bare necessities of life that his brain and imagination were numb. He could not seem to grasp the possibilities that were his.
He began to visualize his cabin on the mountain. A rude structure of logs and boards that he had built with his own eager, inexperienced hands; a strong door, three small windows with wooden shutters.
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