The Plunderer

Plainly the rambling log structure was a road house and the stopping place for a mountain stage. It had the watering trough in front, the bundle of iron pails cluttered around t...

It was the day after the halt at the road house. Half-obliterated by the débris of snowslide and melting torrents, the trail was hard to follow. In some places the pack burros s...

By easy stages indicating competent engineering and a lavish expenditure of money, the road led them downward to a barricade of logs, in an opening of which swung a gate barely...

It took seven days of exploration to reveal the condition of the Cross of Gold, and each night the task appeared more hopeless. The steel pipe line, leading down for three miles...

The sunlight was good to see again--good as only sunlight can be when men have not expected ever again to be enlivened by its glory. They were astonished at the shortness of the...

"It serves you right for bein' so anxious to help one of them dance-hall women; not but what I'd probably 'a' done it myself," was the croaking, querulous consolation offered by...

They were to have another opportunity to puzzle over the character of The Lily before a week passed, when, wishing to make out a new bill of supplies, they went down to the camp...

"Them beans," declared the fat cook, plaintively, "looks as if they had been put through some sort of shrivelin' process. The dried prunes are sure dry all right! Must have been...

"There's one thing about you, pardner, I don't quite sabe," drawled Bill to his employer as they sat in front of their cabin one night, after discussing the assays which Dick ma...

the sounds of industry from above that he did not hear them approach until their feet struck the first planks leading to the heavy log structure. He turned his head slowly towar...

August had come, with its broiling heat at midday and its chill at night, when the snow, perpetual on the peaks, sent its cold breezes downward to the gulches below. Here and th...

"We'll get there as soon as we can," Dick said. "It may not do any good; but we'll demand a word and give them an argument. I haven't time to thank you now, Mrs. Meredith, but s...

In after years it all came back to Dick as a horrible nightmare of unreality, that tragic night's events and those which followed. The grim setting of the coroner's jury, where...

The men of the Croix d'Or slowly made their way upward toward the higher crest of the range, spread out in an impatient fan whose narrow point was made up of the three experienc...

"Of one thing I am sure," said Dick on the following day, when they began to readjust themselves for a decision, "and that is that if we can find work for them, there isn't a ma...

"Wow! Somethin' seems to have kind of livened up the gloom of this dump, seems to me," exclaimed Bill on the following morning, when returning from his regular trip underground,...

Dick waited impatiently at the rendezvous, saw Joan coming, hurried to meet her, and was restrained from displaying his joy by her upheld hand, as she smiled and cautioned: "Now...

Dick suddenly crumpled the sheet of paper, and put it in his pocket. He lifted himself, as a man distracted, from the chair in which he had been sitting, gripping the arms with...

The ache and pain in her whole being was no greater than the colossal desire Dick had to comfort and shield her. He rushed toward her with his arms reached out to infold, but sh...

It was twilight again, and such a twilight as only the Blue Mountains of that far divide may know. It barred the west with golden bands, painted lavish purples and mauves in the...