The pioneer

It had been five o’clock in the clear, still freshness of a May morning when the Colonel had started from Sacramento. Now, drawing rein where the shadow of a live-oak lay like a...

The smell of wood smoke and supper was in the air as the Colonel rode down the main street of Foleys. Under the projecting roof that jutted from the second-story windows and mad...

An hour later as the Colonel was leaving his room, the voices of Forsythe and a new-comer ascending the stairs struck on his ear. He leaned over the baluster and looked down at...

In his room he lit the lamp and flung the window wide. It opened on the upper balcony, and through the foliage of the locusts he could see the lights of the town, and farther up...

Later on in the morning the Colonel waked from a few hours of uneasy slumber. He had thrown himself dressed on his bed and dropped into a sleep from which he had been roused by...

At half-past four he was walking through the dust toward the cottage. The main feeling in his heart was dread. But he could not disregard Alice’s summons--Alice’s dying summons,...

An hour before the time set by June Allen to go to the spring the Colonel was sitting in his room before a table littered with papers. They were the title deeds and the tax cert...

It was half-past five the next morning when Kit Carson paced away from the hotel stables into the rosy daylight. With the freshness of the hour on his face the Colonel passed al...

In the darkness of the early November night Colonel Parrish rattled across town in a hired carriage. It was half-past eight when he left his rooms (they were a fine suite on a s...

Social life in San Francisco at this period had a distinction, a half-foreign, bizarre picturesqueness, which it soon after lost and has never regained. Separated from the rest...

From the great camp across the mountain wall in the Nevada desert, an electric current had begun to thrill and extend its vibrations wherever men congregated. The autumn rumors...

Jerome Barclay lived with his mother in a new house on Taylor Street, near Jackson. They had only been there a short time. Before that South Park had been their home. But within...

In the spring in San Francisco the trade winds come and all wise Californians move inland. In the early seventies the exodus to the country was not noticeably large. Rural hotel...

June and July passed, and the life in the De Soto house was very uneventful. As soon as the group of guests left June requested her sister to ask no more visitors for a time, an...

The winter of ’71-’72 was a feverish one for San Francisco. The rising excitement in Virginia ran like a tidal wave over the mountains to the city by the sea and there broke in...

The year after the Crown Point collapse was a sad and chastened one. Money was tight on all sides. Large houses were closed, servants discharged, dressmakers’ bills cut down. Ma...

During the months of summer, dwellers along the line of the railway became familiar with the figure of Lionel Harrower. He constantly went down to San Mateo on Sunday afternoons...

The last quarter of 1873 was for California and Nevada a period of steadily augmenting excitement. The rumor of new strikes in the California and Con. Virginia grew with each we...

One of the most harassed and uneasy men in these stormy days was Jerry Barclay. He had arrived at a point in his career where he stood arrested and uncertain between diverging p...

The ball given by Mrs. Davenport, to introduce to San Francisco society the fiancée of her son Stanley, was long remembered as one of the most brilliant entertainments ever give...

In the middle of the December afternoon the Colonel had come in early to his rooms to change his coat and brush up a bit. He was going to call on the wife of a pioneer friend wh...

It took the Colonel a week to raise the money. He did it by selling the second of his South Park houses. The sale being a hurried one of property already well on the decline, th...

The mountain wall of the Sierra bounds California on its eastern side. It is a rampart, towering and impregnable, between the garden and the desert. From its crest, brooded over...

The Allen girls moved to Virginia City in April. Their father had gone there early in the year and taken a house which would be a proper and fitting place from which to marry Ro...

Rosamund’s marriage was set for the end of May. There had been great preparations for the event, which was to be the most brilliant one of its kind that had ever taken place in...

Rion Gracey called on June as the Colonel had suggested, called again the week after, and in a short time formed a habit of dropping in every Sunday evening. He generally found...

Jerry was in a bad temper. For some days he had been disturbed by rumors of Rion Gracey’s attentions to June. In the long twilights of the summer evenings Rion had been constant...

Since his connection with the Graceys Jerry had been buying stock in the numerous undeveloped and unpaying mines which had cropped up like mushrooms round the edges of the town....

Jerry’s plans had been laid with the utmost secrecy and care. It behooved him to be wary, for he knew that detection would mean death. Neither the Colonel nor Black Dan would ha...

Black Dan, as he walked to the office that Friday morning, had been giving serious thought to the situation of his son-in-law. Mercedes had not spent the summer in Virginia as h...

On the Friday morning June rose with an oppression of death-like dread weighing on her. Jerry had only told her to hold herself in readiness for that day; she knew nothing furth...