CHAPTER I He awoke in the dark. His awakening was simple, easy, without movement save for the eyes that opened and made him aware of darkness. Unlike most, who must feel and grope and listen to, and contact with, the world about them, he knew himself on the moment of awakening, instantly identifying himself in time and place and personality. After the lapsed hours of sleep he took up, without effort,... more...

DUTCH COURAGE "Just our luck!" Gus Lafee finished wiping his hands and sullenly threw the towel upon the rocks. His attitude was one of deep dejection. The light seemed gone out of the day and the glory from the golden sun. Even the keen mountain air was devoid of relish, and the early morning no longer yielded its customary zest. "Just our luck!" Gus repeated, this time avowedly for... more...

THE NIGHT-BORN It was in the old Alta-Inyo Club—a warm night for San Francisco—and through the open windows, hushed and far, came the brawl of the streets. The talk had led on from the Graft Prosecution and the latest signs that the town was to be run wide open, down through all the grotesque sordidness and rottenness of man-hate and man-meanness, until the name of... more...

MOON-FACE John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind, cheek-bones wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to complete the perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant from the circumference, flattened against the very centre of the face like a dough-ball upon the ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly he had become an offense to my eyes, and I... more...

THE HUMAN DRIFT “The Revelations of Devout and Learn’dWho rose before us, and as Prophets Burn’d,   Are all but stories, which, awoke from Sleep,They told their comrades, and to Sleep return’d.” The history of civilisation is a history of wandering, sword in hand, in search of food.  In the misty younger world we catch glimpses of phantom races, rising, slaying, finding food, building rude... more...

THE HOUSE OF MAPUHI Despite the heavy clumsiness of her lines, the Aorai handled easily in the light breeze, and her captain ran her well in before he hove to just outside the suck of the surf. The atoll of Hikueru lay low on the water, a circle of pounded coral sand a hundred yards wide, twenty miles in circumference, and from three to five feet above high-water mark. On the bottom of the huge and... more...

CHAPTER I I scarcely know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place the cause of it all to Charley Furuseth’s credit.  He kept a summer cottage in Mill Valley, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, and never occupied it except when he loafed through the winter months and read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to rest his brain.  When summer came on, he elected to sweat out a hot and... more...

ARGUMENT In the morning of the world, while his tribemakes its camp for the night in a grove, RedCloud, the first man of men, and the first manof the Nishinam, save in war, sings of the dutyof life, which duty is to make life more abundant.The Shaman, or medicine man, sings offoreboding and prophecy. The War Chief, whocommands in war, sings that war is the onlyway to life. This Red Cloud denies,... more...

CHAPTER I—SOMETHING TO BE DONE He was a very sick white man.  He rode pick-a-back on a woolly-headed, black-skinned savage, the lobes of whose ears had been pierced and stretched until one had torn out, while the other carried a circular block of carved wood three inches in diameter.  The torn ear had been pierced again, but this time not so ambitiously, for the hole accommodated no more than a... more...

CHAPTER I The one opened the door with a latch-key and went in, followed by a young fellow who awkwardly removed his cap.  He wore rough clothes that smacked of the sea, and he was manifestly out of place in the spacious hall in which he found himself.  He did not know what to do with his cap, and was stuffing it into his coat pocket when the other took it from him.  The act was done quietly and... more...