Jess of the Mountain Country

A bruised romantic named Jack Gibbons flees city heartache for the pine-dark hush of Shorty Grandon’s backwoods camp, seeking oblivion in fly-cast dawns and whiskey dusk. His reeling solitude collides with Jess—an orphaned mountain nymph whose only patrimony is a hand-hewn cabin smoldering beneath the saw-toothed ridge. A horse throws Jack into a ravine; Jess, all sinew and starlight, drags him from the underbrush, and the two orbit each other like twin moons of ache and wonder. Their fragile Eden combusts when lightning kisses drought: flames gallop through cedar, Jess’s cabin becomes a kiln, and Jack—scorched, coughing—carries her through a cathedral of fire that turns night into noon. Betrothal follows, scribbled in smoke and trembling lips. Enter Fay, Jack’s citadel-bred sister, arriving like a silk banner across the logging trail; she wrinkles her nose at Jess’s calico rags, then reads the iron beneath the patches and capitulates to admiration. A motorcade to the Gibbons manse becomes a gauntlet of drawing-room spears: matrons titter, old flames flicker, and at a chandeliered ball Jack’s erstwhile sweetheart reclaims his arm. Jess, gutted yet proud, vanishes under owl-lit skies, retreating to the granite womb that reared her. Shorty floors his Stutz Bearcat along switchbacks, Jack clings to the passenger strap like a penitent, and the final reckoning unfolds on a porch where love is re-knit and the mountain finally welcomes the heir it never knew it needed.