Miss Campbell's first two novels (published by Superior) gave promise of a regional writer of considerable power and imagination. This new novel, after a gap of seven years, is again set in the state of Washington, the time, 1882 and a decade thereafter. The pace at the start gives promise of a moving emotional story along the lines of Look to the Mountain (by LeGrand Canon), as a young wife, with her cousin, arrive at a frontier lumber settlement on Puget Sound, to join the husband, whose vision of a future has outrun the facts of the present. But the threads of the story come together in a different pattern -- in the conflict of passions, the breakdown of character and personality, the storm around the figure of Asa, the younger and weaker of the Cummings brothers, whose love for a girl, half-Indian, wrecks several lives. There's good story telling here and good background of place and time, but the emotional levels are only superficially plumbed and the end feeling is one of disappointment in unresolved issues.