The Mystery of The Barranca

So silently did the girl come that the charcoal-burners were forced to jump aside, and, springing in the wrong direction, the hunchback was bowled over by the beast of the _mozo...

Living in the letter of his intention, Sebastien was up next morning and had covered ten miles of the trail before the sun rose over the Barranca wall. Early as it was, however,...

It was in the middle of the rainy season. Stepping out of his office, where he had just added a few drops of Scotch to the water he was absorbing at every pore, the station agen...

To appreciate the accent which the American station agent laid on "folks" it is necessary that one should have been marooned for a couple of years in a ramshackle Mexican statio...

Sprawled on the flat of his back, with his curly head propped on his hands and his lime-eaten boots spread at a comfortable angle, Billy gazed upon their completed labor. The "w...

One afternoon about a week later Mr. William Thornton was to be seen mixing mortar for the bricks he was laying on the smelter foundation. Rising almost sheer from the edge of t...

Thoroughly fagged out by six weary nights on the train, Seyd slept like the dead, and did not awaken until a sudden clatter of pots aroused him to knowledge of a golden cobweb o...

As before said, the last piece of machinery and the first rain arrived simultaneously at Santa Gertrudis. The break in the summer heat came with a south wind which herded mounta...

Coming out from luncheon--at which Sebastien had presided with a grave courtesy which lifted the inn's humble fare of eggs, tortillas, and rice to epicurean heights--Seyd and Fr...

"If we are on the road at daybreak we shall reach the Barranca early in the afternoon," Seyd had said, commenting on his order to the mule-driver. But, fagged out by the day's h...

Fifteen miles away along the rim Francesca and Sebastien had just reined in. On a bare knoll close to the trail which led down to El Quiss three peons were building a beacon of...

Although he had always doubted the phenomenon, Billy's hair stood on end, and when, in the face of Seyd's shouts in Spanish to stop, the burros still came on he felt his cap move.

For two weeks thereafter Seyd held fast to his work, suppressing with iron firmness successive vagrant impulses which urged a second visit to San Nicolas. Then having proved to...

"Phe-ew!" Looking up from a treatise on bricklaying as applied to the building of furnaces, Billy pitched a stone at Seyd, who was experimenting with a batch of lime fresh drawn...

Riding at a hard gallop, Seyd had cut down Sebastien's lead by a full hour in the run along the rim. At the sight of the beacon--which the peons were now thatching with grass--h...

During the night the Barranca walls had, while growing lower, closed in to a long gorge through which the river ran like a millrace. For two hours their ears were dinned and dea...

With Seyd and his cargo of reflections aboard, the train meanwhile puffed steadily up the four-per-cent. grades which carry the railway eleven thousand feet high to the shoulder...

The barrier of debris across the outer buildings had diminished the force of the blow upon the house, and had the water gained instant access to the interior and equalized the p...

During the moment that the horses rested their thoughts reverted to the last occasion when they had overlooked the great void, and if the thought of Sebastien brought a touch of...

Instead of the steps of a church, which form the natural way to their new estate for the great majority of brides, Francesca stepped into hers from the companion ladder of the _...

A hard gallop of eight miles carried Francesca to the forks where the path to and from Santa Gertrudis joined the main valley trail, and she had traveled no more than a hundred...

Leaning down from his perch on the sacked mining tools which formed the apex of their baggage, Billy Thornton punched his companion in the back to call his attention to a scene...

"Really, I don't know what to make of it. That last car load of machinery rusted for a month in the damp heat of the Tehuantepec tropics before we got it traced. It has happened...

In the few minutes that passed before she met Sebastien Francesca had regained self control. To his reproof, "This was foolish; why did you linger?" she calmly replied, "I wishe...

As a matter of fact, Don Luis knew even less than Seyd of the real reason behind his niece's departure. Like many another and much more important event, it was brought about by...

In the calendar of love days count as weeks, months as years; but, though the following week conformed to this universal law, Seyd managed to extract from its laggard hours his...

Breaking through the stream of ocean vapors, the morning sun showed the jungle raising a languid head above the ruins of the flood. Long rents in its green mantle, bare patches...

In the main, Paulo was not a bad old chap. To further the interests of a Garcia he would cheerfully have surrendered his old bones to be boiled in oil, and in his joy at the eve...