The House of Adventure

“I managed to buy these clothes in Belgium, and then I disappeared. Paul Brent died a year ago, and if they look for Tom Beckett, my friend, well—they will never find him. If ne...

Manon saw the smear of satisfaction on his face, and her heart sickened. She had stood aside, watching, till she saw that Bibi had her man pinned under his big body. She picked...

It was after supper that night, and Marie Castener was emptying the last of the coffee into Manon’s cup, when they heard a man’s footsteps outside the door. He knocked and tried...

Yet the adventure appealed to Brent, and Beaucourt had taken a mysterious grip of his manhood. As he sat and stared at the reddening stove and fed it with wood from the heap bes...

He sent them away much happier than they had come to him, which is the best thing that can be said of a man’s religion, and when they had gone he blew out his candle and went up...

The blue cart crunched out of the muddy yard into the road, and drew up outside the cottage. A few neighbours had collected to watch the departure; one or two of them brought pr...

She left him wandering among the ruined cottages, and returned to the café and to Paul. Manon’s ideas had been enlarged by the enthusiasms of old Durand, for he was a man who ha...

As he stood there in the darkness, he became aware of Beaucourt as a place of weird noises. The broken walls and hollow spaces made so many Pan’s pipes for the wind to play upon...

They went to look at the ladder. Manon had discovered it lying behind one of the sheds; it was a thirty-rung ladder, and Brent saw that the right pole needed splinting about thr...

“Mon ami,” she exclaimed, “I shall not go to Ste. Claire to-morrow. I shall stay here several days. There is no time to be lost, and I can help you. We must take what we need be...

But Louis Blanc was tired. He had the whole day before him, and he had his own particular plan. He meant to make Paul fight, hand to hand and body to body, and he wanted to elim...

He felt good, good to the core. When he had filled the bucket and drawn it up, the splashing water itself seemed to laugh in the early sunlight. Brent stood in the street and wa...

“Good God,” he said, “it seems a lot for a man like me to ask for! All that I know is—that I’m going to make good here. Will you let me prove it?”

She had been a little anxious for her man, knowing that he had prepared himself to face a possible ordeal in this return of the natives. It was not only that he loved her and th...

That swinging ridge-beam overhead was the first thing to be tackled. Paul went up the ladder and straddled his way up the gable end to the chimney-stack, and gave his directions...

It was pleasantly cool and shady in the hut, and Prosper, after selecting a bottle and a glass from Mademoiselle Barbe’s shelves, sat down on a box by the doorway.

Brent knew the man, a corporal who had served in the same battalion. He braced himself to the crisis, gave the man stare for stare, a blank look of curiosity, said something in...

Other and more sinister incidents enlarged and filled in the outlines of the feud that was growing in Beaucourt. There was the affair of the Bois du Renard, an outrage that made...

“That is a good idea. And, oh, Paul, don’t forget the spinach seed. And this evening we will go and sit in the cathedral, and afterwards we will drink coffee or a bock outside t...

“You want the doc, chum; that’s what’s the matter with you. Ten days in hospital in a real bed, between real sheets,—with a lovely little nurse feeding you with a spoon.”

A certain aggressively smart figure had swung round the corner, buttons and cap badge polished, chin shaved, puttees neatly rolled, boots black and glossy as the back of a rook.

She went blundering across the yard, and out by the gate leading into the orchard. Crapaud and half a dozen other men just missed the flick of her petticoat round the angle of t...

Two stragglers lay sleeping in an orchard near the village of Beaucourt, sprawling upon a grass bank under the branches of an old apple tree. The sun had cleared the horizon and...

Manon was invisible to them, but her voice and the words that she uttered made her visible to Paul Brent. She was speaking very slowly, and with the naïve persuasiveness of a co...