The Fortune of the Landrays

BENSON'. love for Virginia was the one unusual thing in his otherwise ordinary life. It gave him the joy of a great hope; and it held the fear of a proportionate disappointment....

STEPHEN was mustered out, and returned to Benson, where having nothing better in prospect he opened a real estate office; but from the very first this feeble enterprise was doom...

REDDY wrote Ben Wade and sent him the papers, asking him to explain matters to Mrs. Landray; and Wade took them at once to her together with Crittendon's letter. Virginia was no...

BENSON was aghast when he came to look into the affairs of the shops. The condition there was beyond anything he had anticipated; for in seeking to further his invention, Tom Be...

To the west, where the land dropped from bench to bench until it finally found the level of the flat valley with its farms and irrigating ditches, lay Great Salt Lake; a gleam o...

GIBBS settled Stephen's affairs, and there was left in his hands a small sum of money, which, by dint of borrowing, he increased to a figure that enabled him to take the boy to...

“I am sorry I was detained,” he said smoothly. “But the fact is I've been to see Mr. Benson. I took your aunt there. I tell you she's a trump! She's the one person I know, who's...

STEPHEN had not been able to believe in the reality of his home going until he was settled in the cab that bore him swiftly across the city. He had made so many trips into New Y...

STEPHEN came swiftly into the library. The early morning sun streamed in through the long windows which stood open, and by the table in the centre of the room sat Benson reading...

REDDY took his mother West. It was a journey that he ===conducted with much ostentatious display, but the opportunities in this respect were far less extended than he could have...

BUT to bring himself to the point where he could speak freely and without reserve to Benson, was more difficult even than Stephen had conceived it would be. With singular patien...

TOM BENSON, a younger brother of old Jacob Benson had emigrated to Ohio some time in the early twenties. He was a superior sort of a mechanic, and when Newton Bendy established...

BENSON arrived in Salt Lake City in August. After three days of unsuccessful investigation he sought an interview with Governor Young, at his office. He was ushered into a plain...

STEPHEN was a lonely little figure in Benson's great house; he was vastly depressed by the formal manner of life to which the lawyer had adjusted himself, and for which Mrs. Pop...

HE was unaware of it, but none the less Stephen was on trial with Benson. The lawyer had neither the wish nor purpose to influence him in any particular, he seemed quite willing...

“When did you get to town?” asked Stephen, putting down the lamp he carried. He knew that Gibbs had not come on the afternoon stage for he had been in the crowd at the hotel whe...

AT the expiration of his leave Stephen was detailed for service at the recruiting office that had been opened at Benson; an appointment he received with a very bad grace indeed...

STEPHEN fell to pacing about the wagons as Rogers had done. He saw the fires of the Indians die down until they became mere specks of living colour that seemed to glare steadily...

BENSON began his preparations for the journey West with some reluctance, and it was well into May before he felt he could even fix on a date for his departure; but one morning S...

At first he had shown some interest in the town and in the changes that had taken place during the twenty years covered by his absence; but as the summer merged into fall, and f...

THE deserter squatted on his haunches and spat reflectively at the fire; his mild blue eyes, large and oxlike, gazed into the dancing flames, with an expression of placid conten...

WHEN the railroad came to Benson, it reached down from a lake port, a feeble little tentacle of iron which joined another feeble tentacle that had pushed up from a river point....

THE letters which the brothers and Walsh had written at Fort Laramie, and which they had entrusted to a party of returning emigrants, were the last that reached the town of Bens...

The crowd had dispersed, and silence had fallen on the square. Benson had just entered his office whither Stephen had preceded him. The latter stood before his friend, shame-fac...

THEY saw no more of Basil Landray, Baptiste, and the too-smiling Raymond, which caused them some surprise at first; for the fur trader's sinister threat at parting had not sound...

WHEN Virginia first heard the gossip that linked Anna's name with that of Dr. Stillman's, it won from her a shocked and indignant denial; but a doubt was born in her mind; it tr...

TWO men had built a fire beside a boulder that half filled the narrow pass, and with their feet toward the cold ashes of this fire, still slept in the friendly shelter of the rock.

ON his return to Salt Lake, Benson wrote to Virginia. This letter he intended to carry to St. Louis to post, where he expected to wait for a few days; but his pen faltered, and...

IT was not until the morning of the third day following their arrival in Independence that the members of the Benson and California Mining and Trading Company fell in at the rea...

At his red-brick tavern, Levi Tucker, in a splint-bottom chair, dozed in front of his bar. The rain now falling in torrents and driven by a strong wind, splashed loudly against...

The occupant of the cart had reached that fortunate period where he was knowing the best of both youth and age, for he was, perhaps, six or eight and twenty, but so boyishly sli...

THE position Benson had taken and which he was evidently determined to maintain, was inexplicable to Stephen. He was absolutely silent on this matter that had become of vital si...

“It's Andrew, sir,” a voice answered from the darkness below, and an indistinct figure emerged from the shadow of the house. “Mr. Benson has had a fall, sir. You are not to be a...

BENSON was not mistaken. He had achieved a permanent place in Virginia Landray's regard. She had definitely accepted him, and in the exact degree in which he had wished he might...

AS Anna turned from the lane into the public road she met a cart which held a man and a woman. They were on the point of entering the lane as she left it. She smiled and nodded...

BEYOND the windows of the Golden West Saloon, a cold rain deluged Grant City. Gibbs, in his shirt-sleeves, sat on the edge of his bar and dangled his fat legs. Arling, disreputa...

WADE watched Stephen furtively out of the corner of his eye. To his practical mind, partisanship had its price. Self-interest had always been the paramount consideration with hi...

THE wagons were arranged in a triangle on the hill, and their wheels chained together. Into this enclosure the mules were hastily driven and secured. While Bushrod, assisted by...

THE town bell had struck the hour, three clanging strokes, and even as their echoes lingered in the silence and the night, a candle blinked like a solitary eye in an upper windo...

MCKEEVER'. company left Benson the day the Confederate Cabinet in session at Montgomery, Alabama, greeted with jeers the news that President Lincoln had issued a call for sevent...

MR. TUCKER took the south road out of Benson, his belief being that the runaways would drive across the State to Indiana. Events proved him so far right in this conjecture that...

IN the silence and solitude of his home, by his winter fireside, Benson diagnosed his own case. His, he knew, was a moral malady. The years had given him everything save happine...

IT was an April morning, mild and warm, in the rutted roads, in the pillaged, trampled fields the sassafras and honey-locust had claimed for their abiding place, two armies were...

THE boy on the box was surfeited with travel. Glancing back over the swaying top of the coach, he had seen miles upon miles of hot dusty road, between banked-up masses of forest...

THE Missourian and Jim camped on the edge of the timber. So little of the day was remaining to them after they left the hill that they had been forced to stop here; but they wer...

IF Virginia had been unable to influence Stephen's life as she wished, this was far from being the case with Jane and Harriett, who had wholly abandoned themselves to her care a...

BENSON carried with him continually now a sense of hurt; and out of this came a certain subtle change in the very fibre of his love itself. He lost something of the spirit of wo...

With the twilight, silence had fallen also; not that the town ever expressed itself with any accumulated volume of sound, but the score of teams that had stood hitched by the cu...

AT Cincinnati, a dilapidated wharf boat absorbed the wagons of The Benson and California Mining and Trading Company, and an affable shipping agent, after dwelling with enthusias...

THE weeks that followed Stephen's departure held for Virginia Landray the misery of a first separation. It was the uprooting of all she had counted on as most secure and abiding...

THE old stage road became the Main Street at Benson. Daily over its surface, beneath the thick shade of maples and oaks, creaked and rumbled the huge stages Northward and Southw...

He looked as a man may look who has accomplished some great thing, for so he had, he had brought the news of the world to Benson's door; and what matter if that news had been st...