For two days we had been at the headquarters of the Second Brigade (General McKibben’s), so blissfully contented because at last we had a real wooden and tiled roof over our heads that even the tarantulas–Archibald shook two of them from his blanket in one night–had no terrors for us. The headquarters were in an […]

I. FELIPE As young Felipe Arillaga guided his pony out of the last intricacies of Pacheco Pass, he was thinking of Rubia Ytuerate and of the scene he had had with her a few days before. He reconstructed it now very vividly. Rubia had been royally angry, and as she had stood before him, her […]

The manuscript of the account that follows belongs to a harness-maker in Albuquerque, Juan Tejada by name, and he is welcome to whatever of advertisement this notice may bring him. He is a good fellow, and his patented martingale for stage horses may be recommended. I understand he got the manuscript from a man named […]

“Hey, youse!” shouted the car-boy. He brought his trundling, jolting, loose-jointed car to a halt by the face of the drift. “Hey, youse!” he shouted again. Bunt shut off the Burly air-drill and nodded. “Chaw,” he remarked to me. We clambered into the car, and, as the boy released the brake, rolled out into the […]

“Well, m’son,” observed Bunt about half an hour after supper, “if your provender has shook down comfortable by now, we might as well jar loose and be moving along out yonder.” We left the fire and moved toward the hobbled ponies, Bunt complaining of the quality of the outfit’s meals. “Down in the Panamint country,” […]

I. CHINO’S WIFE On the back porch of the “office,” young Lockwood–his boots, stained with the mud of the mines and with candle-drippings, on the rail–sat smoking his pipe and looking off down the canon. It was early in the evening. Lockwood, because he had heard the laughter and horseplay of the men of the […]

I. THE BEAR—WHEAT AT SIXTY-TWO As Sam Lewiston backed the horse into the shafts of his backboard and began hitching the tugs to the whiffletree, his wife came out from the kitchen door of the house and drew near, and stood for some time at the horse’s head, her arms folded and her apron rolled […]

Very much of this story must remain untold, for the reason that if it were definitely known what business I had aboard the tramp steam-freighterGlarus, three hundred miles off the South American coast on a certain summer’s day, some few years ago, I would very likely be obliged to answer a great many personal and […]

I. On a certain morning in the spring of the year, the three men who were known as the Three Black Crows called at the office of “The President of the Pacific and Oriental Flotation Company,” situated in an obscure street near San Francisco’s water-front. They were Strokher, the tall, blond, solemn, silent Englishman; Hardenberg, […]

“Which I puts it up as how you ain’t never heard about that time that Hardenberg and Strokher—the Englisher—had a friendly go with bare knuckles—ten rounds it was—all along o’ a feemale woman?” It is a small world and I had just found out that my friend, Bunt McBride—horse-wrangler, miner, faro-dealer and bone-gatherer—whose world was […]

The McTeagues and the Ryers lived at the disreputable end of Polk street, away down in the squalid neighborhood by the huge red drum of the gas works. The drum leaked, of course, and the nasty brassy foulness of the leak mingled with the odors of cooking from the ill-kept kitchens, and the reek of […]

This story is to be about young Stayne and a girl named Cresencia Hromada, and it harks back to that fable of Aesop’s about the two jars. You remember that fable of Aesop’s about these jars. They were superlatively beautiful jars, and they were floating in a cistern. They made the discovery that so long […]