Dead Man's Gold E-Book

J. Allan Dunn

• Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

In J. Allan Dunn's gripping novel, "Dead Man's Gold," readers are thrust into a thrilling narrative that weaves together adventure, greed, and the timeless quest for treasure. Set against the backdrop of the rugged American frontier, Dunn employs a blend of vivid imagery and sharp dialogue that brings the landscape and its characters to life. The literary style is characterized by a straightforward yet immersive prose that captures the tension and excitement of the gold rush era, while also probing the moral quandaries faced by its characters in their relentless pursuit of wealth. J. Allan Dunn, a prolific author of adventure novels, drew upon his extensive knowledge of the American West and its folklore when crafting "Dead Man's Gold." His personal experiences and travels throughout the region undoubtedly informed the authenticity of the setting and the authenticity of the characters' struggles. Dunn's passion for storytelling and exploration is palpable throughout the book, reflecting a deep understanding of human ambition and the inevitable consequences that follow. For those who relish gripping tales of adventure, moral ambivalence, and the rugged spirit of the American landscape, "Dead Man's Gold" is a must-read. Dunn masterfully combines suspense and thematic depth, making this an engaging exploration of the human condition informed by the pursuit of riches. Dive into this treasure-laden narrative that brilliantly reflects the allure and dangers of wealth. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.

Leseprobe

J. Allan Dunn

Dead Man's Gold

Enriched edition. A Wild West Treasure Hunt Adventure of Danger and Deceit

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience.

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Paige Gibson

Edited and published by Good Press, 2020

[email protected]

EAN 4064066064365

Table of Contents

Introduction

Historical Context

Synopsis (Selection)

Dead Man's Gold

Analysis

Reflection

Memorable Quotes

Introduction

Table of Contents

This volume assembles a focused selection of fifteen works by J. Allan Dunn under a single cover, presenting them as a coherent body of reading rather than as scattered appearances. The purpose is twofold: to preserve a substantial slice of Dunn’s storytelling in durable form, and to offer readers a panoramic view of his range within popular adventure and frontier fiction. By bringing these pieces together, the collection foregrounds continuities of voice, pace, and thematic concern that can be difficult to perceive when the works are encountered singly. It invites both fresh appraisal and sustained enjoyment of a single author’s craft across multiple narratives.

The contents are prose narratives that span short fiction through longer pieces, encompassing compact tales and extended adventures alike. Readers can expect narrative fiction rather than poetry or essay, with stories that move from brisk, self-contained episodes to more expansive arcs. The tonal register stays within the broad territory of adventure and frontier storytelling, with elements of suspense, pursuit, and sudden reversals. While the lengths vary, the emphasis is consistent: engaging plots, clearly established stakes, and characters tested by circumstance. Taken together, these pieces showcase the breadth of Dunn’s work in popular narrative forms without straying into non-fiction or dramatic writing.

Across the collection, several unifying themes recur. Characters are often confronted with choices that set personal codes against immediate necessity, weighing loyalty, courage, and resourcefulness against risk, uncertainty, and temptation. Landscapes function as crucibles, sharpening conflict and concentrating motive. Treasure, scarcity, and opportunity operate as moral touchstones as much as plot catalysts, revealing where characters stand when pressure mounts. The works favor the tensions of pursuit, the ambiguity of trust, and the calculus of survival, while returning persistently to questions of justice—formal and informal—and to the costs of ambition. These thematic through-lines bind disparate narratives into a recognizable, resonant whole.

Stylistically, Dunn’s hallmark is momentum. Scenes are built for velocity and clarity, with cleanly engineered set pieces, purposeful dialogue, and descriptive strokes that situate action without halting it. The prose privileges the tactile—movement, distance, hazard—over extended abstraction, creating immediacy and a sense of lived stakes. Structure tends toward escalating encounters punctuated by turns that reframe the problem at hand, reflecting the rhythms of tightly plotted popular fiction. The language often incorporates colloquial color while maintaining narrative economy. The result is storytelling that carries the reader forward through pressure, release, and renewed pressure, balancing surprise with the satisfactions of clear causality.

Viewed together, these works illustrate why Dunn’s narratives have retained interest: they fuse entertainment with a steady inquiry into motive and consequence. The collection provides a window onto the conventions of mass-market fiction developed for a wide readership, while also revealing an individual sensibility within those conventions. Readers can track how recurring situations—a contested claim, a precarious alliance, a chase through unforgiving country—become opportunities for character definition. The significance lies less in any single plot than in the cumulative articulation of an ethos: resolve under strain, ethics measured by action, and human connection forged in moments when choices cannot be deferred.

Because the pieces vary in scale, the collection supports multiple modes of reading. One can sample individual stories for a quick immersion in Dunn’s methods or read sequentially to appreciate recurring patterns of setup and payoff. Premises frequently pivot on journeys begun in urgency, unexpected openings that carry hidden costs, and encounters that test judgment as much as strength. The works are accessible in their immediate stakes yet layered in their implications, rewarding close attention to how dialogue and detail signal shifts in power or trust. Each narrative stands alone, but their cumulative effect is that of an extended conversation about risk and responsibility.

For new readers and returning admirers alike, the value of this gathering is the vantage it offers: a concentrated, author-specific tour of adventure storytelling executed with consistency and variety. By situating multiple works side by side, the collection clarifies what feels distinctly Dunn—pace married to precision, action yoked to ethical contour—and how those qualities evolve across different narrative lengths. It is intended as both a reliable point of entry and a basis for further study, affirming the continuing appeal of stories that move swiftly, think clearly about consequence, and find enduring drama where character and circumstance intersect under pressure.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

J. Allan Dunn (1874–1941) was part of the golden age of pulp magazines, publishing adventure and Western tales in venues such as Adventure, Argosy, Blue Book, and Short Stories. Under editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, Adventure (founded 1910 in New York) cultivated brisk, research-driven narratives about remote frontiers and rough professions. Dunn’s career, peaking in the 1910s–1930s, overlapped with mass urban readerships craving inexpensive fiction at 10 or 15 cents an issue. The professionalized pulp marketplace, with regular word-rate contracts and serialized story arcs, encouraged cyclical motifs: treasure hunts, border chases, and mining-camp justice. Dead Man’s Gold gathers stories that exemplify this milieu, balancing documentary detail with the fast pacing those magazines demanded.

Many episodes unfold along the U.S.–Mexico borderlands shaped by the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and Prohibition (1920–1933). Cities like Mexicali (founded 1903) and its twin Calexico (incorporated 1908) thrived on irrigation from the Colorado River and cross-border commerce in liquor, gambling, and labor. Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, and General John J. Pershing’s Punitive Expedition underscored a porous frontier policed later by the U.S. Border Patrol (created 1924). Smuggling trails, desert outposts, and bilingual communities supplied settings and tensions that echo across several tales. Dunn’s characters navigate treaties, customs posts, and shifting allegiances where a desert wash could be both a hiding place and an international line.

Gold and silver culture grounds the collection’s prospectors, assayers, and claim jumpers. The General Mining Act of 1872 legalized mineral entry on public lands, codifying the staking rituals that drive conflicts in camps and canyons. Techniques relevant to arid districts—dry washing with bellows, burro packing, and water hauling—sit beside industrial advances such as the MacArthur–Forrest cyanide process (patented 1887) that made low-grade ore profitable. From California’s Mother Lode legacy to the Mogollon district of New Mexico (boom years c. 1890–1915), the Southwest teemed with rumor and risk. Express offices and assayers, often contracted with Wells Fargo, linked remote diggings to San Francisco and El Paso, and made fraud a constant narrative hazard.

The advance of rails and wires transformed pursuit and escape across mesa and cañon. The Southern Pacific reached Yuma, Arizona, in 1877 and El Paso in 1881; the Atlantic & Pacific, later absorbed by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, bridged northern Arizona by 1883. Telegraph lines, stage stations, and, later, motorcars compressed distance yet left blank spaces where a posse still rode. Territorial law evolved into state institutions with the twin admissions of New Mexico and Arizona in 1912. Sheriffs, U.S. Marshals, and ad hoc posses coexist in Dunn’s world with vigilance committees and mining-camp juries, dramatizing the gray zone between statutory authority and communal, often violent, expectations of justice.

Place-names and landscapes in these stories register deep time. The Mogollon Rim and Mogollon Mountains recall a cultural tradition archaeologists date roughly to 200–1450 CE, alongside Ancestral Puebloan sites and Hohokam irrigation legacies. Spanish colonization layered missions and presidios across the region from the late 17th century in Sonora to Alta California after 1769, leaving language, law, and Catholic iconography. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and the Gadsden Purchase (1853) redrew boundaries traversed by miners and vaqueros alike. The Apache Wars ended in 1886 with Geronimo’s surrender, but dispossession and reservation policy persisted. Echoes of sacred places, petroglyphs, and ruined adobes inform Dunn’s treasure legends without reducing them to mere backdrop.

Mining and ranch towns were volatile mosaics. Saloons, dance halls, boardinghouses, and assay offices clustered around a single well or stamp mill, and reputations could be made or ruined by one card game. Women ran businesses, kept books, and, in fiction as in life, negotiated power in spaces coded as masculine—roles suggested by names like Lola or Peggy Furniss. Camps drew Mexican vaqueros, Anglo prospectors, African American cowboys, and Chinese teamsters and cooks, even as the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and local ordinances restricted work and residence. Temperance drives, anti-vice committees, and church socials coexisted with lynch law and vigilantism, making honor, rumor, and suspicion combustible social currencies.

The physical West underwrites every pursuit in Dead Man’s Gold. Water scarcity shaped tactics and law, from riparian fights to the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, which created a federal Reclamation Service to dam and divert rivers. The Forest Service, founded 1905 under Gifford Pinchot, imposed grazing permits and timber rules that complicated open-range habits established before Joseph Glidden’s 1874 barbed-wire patent fenced prairies. High mesas and sky-island ranges demand local knowledge: dry gulches that flash-flood in July, alkali flats, piñon belts where a burro can vanish. Survival skills—tracking, reading weather, rationing—are not mere color; they regulate the tempo of chases, standoffs, and sudden fortunes or deaths.

Dunn’s Westerns speak to and against popular templates. Dime-novel figures like Street & Smith’s Diamond Dick (c. 1898–1911) taught readers to expect glittering rogues, while late–19th-century “lost mine” lore primed themes of a mother lode—Madre d’Oro—just out of reach. The Great Depression (after 1929) sent new waves of men back to the gulches; the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which raised the U.S. price to 35 dollars an ounce, briefly improved prospects and revived assay offices. Cheap pulps endured as mass entertainment through the 1930s, letting Dunn braid chase, suspicion, and pursuit across mesas and canyons, while meditating on risk, luck, and the shifting moral economies of the border West.

Synopsis (Selection)

Table of Contents

Skyfields

A frontier tale set in the high country, where ambition and survival play out on wide-open ranges as men stake their claims under a boundless sky.

A Secret in Three Parts

A mystery told in three linked episodes, gradually unveiling a concealed motive and its ripple effects across a rough-edged community.

The Wisdom OF Wat Lyman

A character-driven story in which seasoned plainsman Wat Lyman applies hard-won judgment to steer others through a thorny moral and practical dilemma.

Mexicali

A border-town yarn set in Mexicali, where cross-cultural tensions and quick opportunities collide with a personal quest that risks more than money.

Lola

A portrait of a woman whose choices entangle drifters and prospectors, shifting the balance between desire, loyalty, and survival in a camp on the edge.

Diamond Dick

A fast-paced tale about a man known for luck and bravado, drawn into a high-stakes confrontation that tests reputation, wealth, and identity.

Suspicion

A taut study of trust among frontier partners, where a creeping doubt threatens to unravel an enterprise before the truth is known.

In Stone Men Cañon

An adventure in a canyon of eerie rock formations, where a search for passage—or hidden wealth—turns perilous as the terrain tightens its grip.

On Mogollon Mesa

A high-desert episode on the Mogollon, where weather, terrain, and human rivalry converge at a critical moment of reckoning.

Peggy Furniss

A character study of Peggy Furniss, whose resolve and compassion redirect a simmering conflict and reveal unexpected strength.

"Bueno"

A brief borderlands encounter where a single word becomes common ground, smoothing tense negotiations in a landscape that favors pragmatism.

The Dry Placer

A mining-camp story centered on a dry placer claim, charting the risks, tricks, and sudden turns of fortune that shadow the hunt for gold.

Madre d'Oro

A legend-tinged search for a fabled 'Mother of Gold,' blending rumor, map-traces, and obsession with the unforgiving realities of the backcountry.

On the Butte

A standoff atop an isolated butte forces adversaries to reckon with vantage, patience, and pride as the balance of power shifts.

The End of a Chase

A concluding pursuit that examines what victory costs when hunter and quarry finally meet, and the chase gives way to consequence.

Dead Man's Gold

Main Table of Contents

Skyfields

A Secret in Three Parts

The Wisdom OF Wat Lyman

Mexicali

Lola

Diamond Dick

Suspicion

In Stone Men Cañon

On Mogollon Mesa

Peggy Furniss

"Bueno"

The Dry Placer

Madre d'Oro

On the Butte

The End of a Chase

Skyfields

CHAPTER I

Table of Contents

Skyfields

THE quartet, standing together at the far end of the bar, close to the entrance to the dance hall that adjoined it, was a striking one; not so much from any one of them differing widely from the mixed types of the busy mining camp, as in the fact that they made up an unusual combination. Mining, as war, maketh for strange company, but it was seldom that four men, so varying in age, in temperament, appearance, and experience, chummed together.

"The Foursome," Stone had dubbed the shaft that they were slowly sinking in the stubborn dyke of purple porphyry under which, said Skyfields, ran continuously the rich vein of sylvanite, the discovery of which had caused the rush to Skyfields and changed that jumble of jagged peaks into so many human antheaps of never-flagging industry and never-failing hope. And "The Foursome" the camp had dubbed the partners though they had separate names for them as individuals.

There was Jim Stone—dreamer, waster, chased into the higher hills by the results of his own dissipations; ​dressed in Bedford-cord riding breeches. Cordovan puttees and shoes, and a gray flannel shirt, all the worse for wear, but fitting him with a perfection that was aggressive even in poverty. Jim was blond and blue-eyed amid his tan. His broad shoulders should have been straighter and his chest should have shown more development. His good chin made one wonder why he was receiving monthly checks from New York, until you saw how stubborn it was, and reflected that all remittances are not necessarily those of charity or tolerance. As a matter of fact, Jim's checks came from the only portion of his inheritance that he could not lay his prodigal fingers upon in its entirety, but as he never discussed his private affairs with anybody, nor showed interest in theirs, he was classed as one of those who are paid to stay away from the family rooftree. His camp sobriquet was "The Dude."

There was Wat Lyman, whose white beard fanned wide and low across his faded blue shirt and whose time- and weather-beaten face, like a carving in mahogany, was seamed like the payrock he had spent his life in seeking—Wat Lyman, prospector, and the only miner of the four of them, a giant whose eyes were a little dim and whose muscles were a little lacking in fibrin, but whose word was his bond and whose courage never faltered[1q].

There was the man who called himself Frank Healy, whose dark eyes were too close together, too small, too shifty, and whose hands suggested that he handled a deck of cards far better than a drill. A ​soft-fleshed man, with high cheekbones and the nose of a hawk, thin-lipped and sneery, watchful, chary of speech, careful of his liquor. A gambler who had lost his stake-money, was the general opinion of Skyfields regarding Healy, and private judgment referred to him as "The Con Man."

And there was "Lefty" Larkin, squat but strong, undersized, undeveloped in every way, save in a certain cunning sharpened by experience that often beat superior wits which did not work quickly enough along certain lines. He had a face not unlike an English pug dog, had Lefty, with his bashed-in nose, deep-set, pale-blue eyes, and heavy lines from mouth corners to nose angles. There was a certain rugged honesty suggested in his plainness that helped Lefty to get by. You had a feeling that he was square with his pals. He was a battered specimen and it was hard to arrive at his age. He was a migrated Cockney from Seven Dials, London, his early upbringing grafted on to later education in the Bowery. Soldier, sailor, tinker, thief, fifth-rate pugilist, and general drifter—that was Lefty Larkin. Skyfields called him "The Bruiser."

Stone figured that Lefty had hurriedly jumped a train for somewhere, for some reason, and that his choice of Skyfields was not all his own, save that it fitted a present desire for retirement. He did not care what Lefty had done. The grown-up gamin amused him and, after the first hand-out and a general talk, he had offered Lefty a job on the claim. No wages, unless there was some spare money at the ​end of a month after the grub and explosives had been bought, but a share of the shack and what it held, of the shaft and what they might find at the bottom. Stone did not expect to find a fortune there. Wat Lyman was the one who leavened the Foursome with faith in their prospect.

Jim Stone had located the claim and, mainly because he did not know how to go about its development, he took in as his first partner Lyman, back from one of his perennial pilgrimages and looking for a grubstake. Frank Healy, happening along, offered some money at a time when the monthly checks had failed suddenly, owing to a prostrate market and an undeclared dividend. So drifted together the Foursome, and thus the embryo mine was named by Stone.

Stone held the drill and spooned the muck at the bottom of the hole. Lyman pounded and set the charges of dynamite. Healy cooked, and cooked well; there was no one in Skyfields who fared as well as the "Foursome." Lefty handled the little forge and the resharpening of the drills and kept the shack in shape. It was a peculiar twist of Lefty's make-up that the little cabin was as neat and clean as if some precisian of an old maid had presided over its keeping, rather than a wandering Cockney of low mental and moral calibre.

For the last week Stone had been taking occasional turns at the sledge to relieve Lyman, for the porphyry was hard as cement. Lyman was easily twice his age, with a few years thrown in, and Stone ​was ashamed of himself for letting an old man do all the hard work. He had his reward. He began to feel that he was developing some back muscles and others in his arms. For the first time in years he was filling his lungs at each breath. It was beginning to be a real pleasure to bring down the hammerhead with a sounding swang on the mushroomed top of the drill, to feel the steel grind and bite into the rock, and note Lyman, with a grunt, turn the point slightly for the next driving blow while he poured a little water from a can into the hole. But the prospect was only a pit in the solid stone, a long way from being a mine, or even looking like one.

"You see," said Lyman, encouragingly, as he shoved the bottle up to Healy and Lefty, who were nearest the dance hall, with Stone on the right of Lyman, nearest the door, "you can't tell a thing 'bout the dyke. Trenton made his strike a'most at grass roots. Up on Split Peak they found high-grade after eighty foot."

"Gawd!" ejaculated Lefty. "And us honly down heighteen! That rock's 'arder than the 'eart of a petrified miser. Fair turns the edge of the drills like they was pewter, 'stead of steel."

"The porphyry don't seem to foller the natural dip," went on Lyman. "Seems to have found a reg'lar level, like it had been poured in liquid."

"If that rock was ever liquid," broke in Lefty, "then the bloomin' pyramids was built of mush."

"No sayin' how fur we may have to go," continued Lyman, placidly, used to Lefty's comments. "You ​can see it's thick by the lay of the land. Others saw that, that's why we got a claim on it at all. But the gold's at the bottom of it, that's the main thing."

He stopped suddenly. Jim Stone, watching his face, saw the kindlier wrinkles about eyes and mouth vanish while sterner lines, more deeply bitten, asserted themselves. The gray eyes flashed and hardened. Even the white beard seemed to bristle, like a mane. Lyman had suddenly thrown off years like a cloak. His actions, generally deliberate, were faster than the eye could record, coördinate, purposeful.

He swept aside Stone with one strong hand while the other swooped down to the holster of the heavy six-gun at his right hip. Stone, over his shoulder, saw the other men in the barroom flattening themselves against bar and wall, rising hurriedly from their seats. The bartender had disappeared. The door had opened and, in its frame, silhouetted against the golden glow of the sunset, stood the figure of a man; sinister, menacing, a triangle of light swiftly enlarging between his crooked elbow and his body, like the shutter of a camera, then closing. From the black bulk of his body there came a burst of red fire, a split-second before Lyman's gun spat out its bullet. The two reports blended, roaring in the low-ceilinged room. Stone never lost the fancy that he heard the actual thup of the missile that struck Wat Lyman's breast and sent him staggering back against his partner, clutching at the bevel of the bar. Then ​there was a dull thud followed by a sharper sound. The man in the doorway had fallen and his revolver had flown from his hand.

The slight mist of exploded gases, acrid with the reek of the discharge, cleared, and showed the new-comer lying prostrate, pitched forward on his face, with outspread arms and drawn-up legs, looking ludicrously like a swimmer stranded by a suddenly retreating wave in the very act of propulsion. From underneath his face a dark stream was slowly reaching out, feeling a blunted way along the dusty floor, like a flattened worm.

As the crash of the double explosion thundered, reverberated, and was silent, a brief silence followed. Then from the dance hall poured a ruck of miners and women. The men who had flattened themselves jumped out to the centre of the room, gazing toward the body in the doorway. Calm and unashamed, the bartender rose from behind his barricade. The sound of running feet clattered on the wooden walk outside the saloon and the marshal of Skyfields, with one quick, shrewd glance at the dead man, stepped across the corpse and entered, alert, questioning, taking in instantly the little group at the far end of the bar where Stone supported Lyman. The latter had set back his gun into its holster and placed his right hand on his chest, hidden by his beard. He straightened up as the marshal came toward him.

"He drew first, Mara," said Lyman, his voice sounding as if he had been climbing hard and fast. ​"He knew I'd been lookin' for him for twelve years, an' I reckon he figgered I'd kill him on sight. He was wrong thar. I wanted to talk to him first. But he had the drop on me. The boys saw it, I reckon."

Half-a-dozen men corroborated. The bartender spoke authoritatively.

"That's straight, Mara. Lyman, here, was talking to his partners when the door opened and I see this chap givin' the crowd the once over. He drew his gun an', seein' the muzzle was gen'ally p'inted this way, an' I didn't know how good or bad a shot he was nor who he was aimin' at, for certain, I took no chances."

"You wouldn't," said the marshal, crisply but without malice.

"No, I wouldn't. But the guy pulled before Lyman even saw him. An' the old-timer nearly beat him to it at that."

The marshal nodded. He walked over to the body, stooped, took hold of an elbow, and turned it over. The level beams of the sunset flamed on the still features, a high-bridged nose, black brows, and a black beard and moustache. Fairly in the centre of the forehead was a dark pit where Lyman's bullet had targeted and from which the thick blood slowly oozed.

"Dead as a skinned woodchuck," said Mara. "Better get him out of the road, boys, and chuck a cloth over him."

Two loungers, swapping odd jobs about the saloon for occasional drinks, dragged the dead man out of ​the doorway by the boots and laid him on the floor under the window. One of them took the dust-cloth from the roulette wheel and covered the still form.

"You gals get back into the dance hall an' take yore pardners with you," suggested Mara, his eyes emphasizing the command. "Hurt any, Lyman?" he asked, scanning the features of the prospector which were turning a queer gray underneath the bronze. Already he had whispered to Stone to "get out of this soon's we can."

"I'm still standin', ain't I?" he answered. "We're all goin' up to the cabin, Mara, 'case you want me. The name of that skunk was Sam Lowe. What was between him an' me was personal. He got what was comin' to him. He was assayer by business, an' as crooked in that as in everything. Come along, boys. If that's all right, marshal?"

Mara nodded. He was a man of few words. Mining camp law was primitive. To shoot in self-defence was justifiable. The onus rested with the aggressor. The man who had pulled first was dead and that ended the episode so far as justice was concerned. He strolled over to the bar and took the drink the bartender had poured out for him.

Stone tucked his arm into that of Lyman's, sensing that the prospector was more badly hurt than he acknowledged. Healy and Lefty followed.

At the door Lyman paused.

"I want to look at him," he said to Stone. Stone lifted the cloth from the face of the dead man and ​Lyman stooped, with an effort, peering at the waxen face in the shadow.

"It's him all right," he said. "I wanted to be sure. Come on, boys. Hold on a minute. Lefty, you get a pint of whisky and bring it along. I'm goin' to need it."

As they stepped out into the cold, clear twilight, where the peaks showed sharp against the golden olive of the fading sky, Lyman staggered. Healy caught at his other arm.

"Reckon you'll have to carry me, boys," said Lyman, and his voice wheezed. "I'm leaking air like a ripped bellows. Got me in the lungs. Bleeding's internal. I c'ud make it to the cabin but I want to save my strength. Got a lot to tell ye. Give me a swig o' that whisky 'fore we start, Lefty."

Stone grasped his left wrist with his right hand and Healy followed his example. Between them they made an interwoven seat for Lyman. It wasn't far to their cabin and it was downhill all the way.

Behind then the raucous orchestrion in the dance hall started up again and the dancers glided and shuffled over the floor. The bartender, busy with a rush of orders, sent out for a helper before the other's watch was on. Save for the dwindling talk of the witnesses, the incident was closed, the stiffening form under the roulette table's dust cloth forgotten until two Mexicans, commandeered by Mara, came up the hill to take it away.

A Secret in Three Parts

CHAPTER II

Table of Contents

A Secret in Three Parts

THERE was no doctor at Skyfields. The camp had not yet attained to that dignity. A good many of the miners had done rough surgery, could set a limb, tie an artery, and attend to superficial wounds, but a bullet through the lungs, with internal hemorrhage, was beyond their skill. Lyman himself knew as much of such practice as any of them and he was convinced that his case was hopeless.

When they laid him on his built-in bunk in the corner of the little cabin and stripped him for an examination, he shook his head and protested that they were only wasting time. The bullet could be felt lodged in the muscles of the back but he would not allow them to attempt to remove it.

"I've seen men shot this way," he said, "and doctors working over 'em. They didn't get well, not when they were as old as I am."

The wound, half hidden in the matted gray hair of his chest, seemed almost a trifling thing, blue at its contracting edges, with only a smear of blood from the piercing of the scanty outer tissues.