Fiction Books

CHAPTER I It had rained steadily for three days, the straight, relentless rain of early May on the Missouri frontier. The emigrants, whose hooded wagons had been rolling into Independence for the past month and whose tents gleamed through the spring foliage, lounged about in one another's camps cursing the weather and swapping bits of useful information. The year was 1848 and the great California... more...

EMERSON'S WIFE AND OTHER WESTERN STORIES Nick Ellhorn awoke and looked around the room with curiosity and interest, but without surprise. He had no recollection of having entered it the night before, and he was lying across the bed fully clothed. But he had long ago ceased to feel surprise over a matter of that sort. His next movement was to reach for his revolver, and he gave a grunt of... more...

CHAPTER I Really, mother, I can't sit any more. I'm that stiff!—and as cold as anything.' So said Miss Bella Morrison, as she rose from her seat with an affected yawn and stretch. In speaking she looked at her mother, and not at the painter to whom she had been sitting for nearly two hours. The young man in question stood embarrassed and silent, his palette on his thumb, brush and... more...

A DUET "Well, Margaret!" "Well, Uncle John!" "Not a word to throw at a dog, as Rosalind says?" "You are not a dog, Uncle John. Besides, you know all about it without my saying a word, so why should I be silly, and spoil your comfortable cigar? Dear children! They will have a delightful time, I hope; and of course it is perfectly right that they should go to their father when... more...

A shouting wave of men rioted through the engine room. From the bridge above the hulking atomics, Chief Engineer Durval vollied orders in a thunderous voice. "You men—you!" he raged. "Use your heads, not your feet. Drive them toward the door." A scattering of Them—compact darting beasts the color of a poppy—scuttled into the shadow of an engine. Heavy Davison wrenches clubbed... more...

hen he was nine, Vogel almost killed another boy who inadvertently scattered his half-completed jigsaw puzzle. At sixteen, he discovered the mysteries of the Danish Gambit, and cried. At twenty-two, he crouched in a foxhole on Okinawa, oblivious to the death bursting about him, squinting in a painful ecstasy at the tattered fragment of newspaper on his knee. His sergeant screamed in agony, then died at... more...

The problem,"said Cassidy, "would seem to be simple." He thumped his outsized knuckles against the desk. "Almost too simple." "Why?" The other was a wearer of the black and silver uniform of Extrasol Traders; a short man, made shorter by the beer-barrel shape of his body and the extreme width of his shoulders. His head was capped with close-cropped gray curls. "Why?"... more...

"HAIL, THOU THAT ART HIGHLY FAVOURED, THE LORD IS WITH THEE! BLESSED ART THOU AMONG WOMEN!" Such was the congratulatory language in which the commissioned angel addressed the virgin of Nazareth, when about to announce the intention of Heaven, that she should become the mother of Jesus; and such the strain which we cannot help feeling disposed to adopt, while recording her illustrious name, and... more...

rom inside the dome, the night sky is a beautiful thing, even though Deimos and Phobos are nothing to brag about. If you walk outside, maybe as far as the rocket field, you notice a difference. Past the narrow developed strip around the dome, the desert land lies as chilled and brittle as it did for eons before Earthmen reached Mars. The sky is suddenly raw and cruel. You pull your furs around your... more...

BY THE EARLY TRAIN. The ascending sun threw its slanting rays abroad on a glorious August morning, and the little world below began to awaken into life—the life of another day of sanguine pleasure or of fretting care. Not on many fairer scenes did those sunbeams shed their radiance than on one existing in the heart of England; but almost any landscape will look beautiful in the early light of a... more...