The Young Surveyor; Or, Jack on the Prairies

A young fellow in a light buggy, with a big black dog sitting composedly beside him, enjoying the ride, drove up, one summer afternoon, to the door of a log-house, in one of the...

The horse was driven to a good shady place on the edge of the woods, relieved of his bridle, and left in charge of the dog. In the mean while the old man cut a few oak saplings...

The new stake having been stuck in the hole left by the point of the old one, and plenty of fresh turf piled up about it, the old man wiped his fingers on the dry prairie-grass,...

They were a long way off,--more than half a mile, he thought. Evidently they had not seen him. Though marvellously quick to catch scent or sound, deer have not a fine sense of s...

Jack's first thought, after assuring himself that his horse was irrevocably gone, was to run for help to the line of settlements on the other side of the grove, where some means...

On a sort of headland jutting out from the high timber region into the low prairie of the river bottom, stood a house, known far and near as "Lord Betterson's," or, as it was so...

For an answer to this question, the person most interested in it, who had as yet said least, was shown into the house. Rufe and Wad and Link and little Chokie came crowding in a...

Leaving Jack to drive home the borrowed mare in the harness of the stolen horse, and to take such measures as he can for the pursuit of the thief and the recovery of his propert...

In due time a rough farm-wagon was backed down upon the wharf, and a swarthy man, with a high, hooked nose, like the inverted prow of a ship, boarded the schooner, and scratched...

Jack was so incensed, when she came to the upshot of the adventure, that he wished to go back at once and make the slim youth's acquaintance. But she would not permit so foolish...

In due time the wagon was driven to the wharf; and Vinnie, parting from the captain and his wife with affectionate good-byes, rode out in the freshness of the morning across the...

A lively sensation was produced, the next forenoon, when a youth and a girl, in a one-horse wagon, with a big dog and a small trunk, arrived at Lord Betterson's "castle."

"I d'n' know; father got out of patience, I guess, or out of money. 'T was a wet time, and the water came into it, so they stunned it up; and now it's dry all summer."

There were two horses feeding in the pasture, not far apart. But only one heeded the call, lifted head, pricked up ears, and answered with a whinny. It was the lost Snowfoot, gi...

Rufe showed his contempt for it by a scornful laugh. "I'll tell you just what there is in it; and it will show you the sort of man you have to deal with. We haven't an inch of h...

Peakslow had finished greasing his wheels, and was about harnessing a pair of horses which Zeph held by their halters at the door of a log-stable. One of the horses was Snowfoot.

Vinnie learned only too soon why Jack had dreaded so much to have her enter the Betterson household; and, in a momentary depression of spirits, she asked herself whether, if she...

Returning from his interview with Mr. Peakslow, Jack drove up on the roadside before the "castle," asked Rufe to hold the horse a minute, and ran to the door to bid Vinnie good by.

The dinner, though late that day, was unusually sumptuous, and Betterson and his boys brought to it keen appetites from their work. Vinnie's cooking received merited praise, and...

A doctor from North Mills came once a week to visit Cecie and the sick mother and baby. One afternoon he brought in his chaise a saddle and bridle, which he said a young fellow...

Jack ran up to the road to get a look, and came laughing back to the house, where the boys and their load of water had by that time arrived.

Very pale, with the bridle dangling from his arm, and Lion walking dejectedly by his side (the sympathetic dog always knew when his master was in trouble), Jack returned to the...

"In the first place," said Jack, standing outside the door, and looking over toward the spring, hidden by intervening bushes on a ridge, "we must have a water-level, and I think...

"I can look right over into his barnyard," he reported to his companions below. "There's old Wiggett with his ox-cart, unloading something out of Peakslow's wagon; and there's P...

The little party set off, watched by Vinnie with a good deal of anxiety. The dog was left in the edge of the corn; and Jack, with a good milky ear in his pocket, followed Mr. Be...

"You'd better stay where you are,--accept a friend's disinterested advice," remarked Betterson. "If your boy had been on the right side of the fence, minding his own business,--...

When Link the next morning went to the spring for water he found that the Peakslow boys (it could have been nobody else) had, by a dastardly trick, taken revenge for the defeat...

After breakfast Vinnie left Lill to "do the dishes," and went with her box of salve to fulfil her promise to Mrs. Peakslow. Dud and Zeph were off at work with their father; and...

Jack had one day been surveying a piece of land a few miles east of Long Woods. It was not very late in the afternoon when he finished his work; and he found that, by going a li...

For a second time Jack now travelled that woodland road under odd circumstances; the first occasion being that on which he himself had pulled in the shafts, while Link pushed be...

Lord Betterson now came out of the house, calm and stately, but with something of the look in his eye, as he turned it upon his nephew, which Jack had observed when it menaced P...

Radcliff resumed his place in the family. But he soon found that his relations to it were no longer what they had been before the days of Vinnie and Jack.

Jack returned home, unexpectedly, that night. He jumped for joy when told of Mr. Betterson's call and the message he had left. The promise of money due himself could not have pl...

"I didn't accuse Zeph of stealing," said Jack, fearful of being blamed by Vinnie. "They were at supper; and I just said, 'Zeph, my boy, what did you do with my compass?' He deni...

The storm could not have been two minutes in passing. Then it suddenly grew light, the tempest lulled, the heavens cleared, and in not more than ten minutes the sunset sky was s...

"He has taken the road to Chicago," said Jack, easily tracking the wheels after the recent rain. "But he'll find it not so easy selling the horse there a second time."

Jack went out with the lantern upon the ruined abutment of the bridge, and showed a space beside the drift-wood, in the turbid and whirling current, where fording seemed practic...

It found many a trace of the previous day's devastation,--trees uprooted or twisted off at their trunks, branches and limbs broken and scattered, fences blown down, and more tha...

In the course of the day Mr. Betterson and Rufe visited the supposed scene of Rad's disaster, and there met by chance Jack and his friend Forrest Felton, who for a similar objec...

"Mercy on me!" said Caroline, hearing an unusual noise in the front part of the house; "now we are to have the racket of those Peakslow children! What could you have been thinki...

Meanwhile the boys were full of ambition regarding their water-works. The project had cost them a good deal more trouble than they had anticipated at first; but they were amply...