Dipper of Copper Creek

Excerpt from Dipper of Copper CreekRain clouds hung gray-blue and low over the ghost town of Gothic, lying two miles high in the Colorado Rockies. With no more sound than the flight of an owl, they swept over the sun-blackened cabins and loosed their burden, drenching the town-site. Although it was the end of May, the glacial valley was a bowl of snow sitting high in the second range of the Elk Mountains.Two thousand feet below in the town of Crested Butte it was spring. The snow was gone, the flowers were nodding along the roadways. Even the mountain peaks, that stood thirteen and fourteen thousand feet high, were snowless. At those skyscraping heights the alpine sun was like a torch that burned the ice away. Nevertheless, the peaks were cold, and the icy air that surrounded them poured into the valley and held the snow there until early June.The month of May in Gothic town would have looked like Christmas were it not for the tumbling pillows of rain clouds that were bringing the thaw to the valley of the high country.Whispering Bill Smith was the only living man in the snowbound ghost town. The old prospector had wintered in to run his trap line and for eight long months he had listened to no voices other than those of the trumpeting winds and the hardy Canada jays.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.