Books: French & Indian War

THE COLD JOURNEY—Grace Zaring Stone—Morrow ($2.50).

In the literary as well as the geographical sense there are still wide open spaces in the U. S. Such trail-blazing authors as James Fenimore Cooper. Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Bret Harte have yet to be crowded out of their frontier freeholds, may still be said to have squatters’ rights. But last week Author Grace Zaring Stone trespassed on Cooper’s hunting-ground, and if she makes many more such successful expeditions, Cooper’s title to the land will be considerably shaken. The Cold Journey may not prove as popular as The Last of the Mohicans (it will never be a juvenile), but that would not necessarily mean it was a less worthy book. Even Cooper-addicts will admit that Author Stone has done a first-rate job. Her admirers will compare The Cold Journey favorably with Willa Gather’s Shadow on the Rock.

The frontier town of Redfield, Mass. (now Deerfield), was in poor shape for defense against the French and their Indian allies. Its palisade was old and rotten and a heavy snowfall had made it even less of a protection. There were only 150 men in the town. The cold and sleepy sentries did not suspect the attack until it was too late. But the Indian warriors, under the nominal command of French officers, did not massacre everybody. They captured all the men, women and children they could, made off with them on the cold journey to Canada, to hold them for ransom. A woman two days out of childbed survived while others fell or were tomahawked by the way. Parson Chapman nearly went out of his head when the Indians let his wife drown under the river ice.

In Canada those who were left were divided up—some to Montreal and Quebec, some to the Indian villages. When Mrs. Lygon had to leave her husband lying at the point of death, she gave up, let herself fall in love with a young Frenchman. The parson’s son took to Indian life like a duck to water. Others of the captives became acclimatized in their degrees. But the stout-hearted minority, too Protestant to succumb to death, Catholicism or Frenchified ways, got their ransom or their freedom one way or another, plodded home to make a new palisade for Redfield, build up again their charred and blood-soaked houses.

The Author. Few U. S. Navy wives have found either the time or the talent to do what Author Grace Zaring Stone has done. Manhattan-born (1896), cosmopolitanly educated (she studied music in Paris, dancing at the Duncan School there), a War veteran (she worked in the British Red Cross until her health broke), she has followed her sailor husband. Commander Ellis S. Stone, to the West Indies, Europe, China, is now stationed with him in Washington, D.C. Shapely, sprightly, a crackling talker, she has produced, besides a daughter, five books by the way (others: Letters to a Djinn, The Heaven and Earth of Dona Elena, The Almond Tree, The Bitter Tea of General Yen).