Action & Adventure Books

Chapter One. “Mind what you’re doing! Come down directly, you young dog! Ah, I thought as much. There, doctor: a job for you.” It was on board the great steamer Chusan, outward bound from the port of London for Rockhampton, Moreton Bay, and Sydney, by the north route, with a heavy cargo of assorted goods such as are wanted in the far south Colonies, and some fifty passengers, for the most part... more...

CHAPTER I. THE “PILGRIM.” On the 2nd of February, 1873, the “Pilgrim,” a tight little craft of 400 tons burden, lay in lat. 43° 57’, S. and long. 165° 19’, W. She was a schooner, the property of James W. Weldon, a wealthy Californian ship-owner who had fitted her out at San Francisco, expressly for the whale-fisheries in the southern seas. James Weldon was accustomed every season to send... more...

ESPERANCE, THE SON OF MONTE-CRISTO. Esperance, the son of Monte-Cristo, lay sleeping in the comfortable bed provided for him in the house of Fanfar, the French colonist, as related at the close of the preceding volume, "The Wife of Monte-Cristo." The prostration and exhaustion brought on by the excitement and fatigue of his terrible adventure with the remorseless Khouans rendered his sleep as... more...

PROLOGUE The Frenchman beside me had been dead since dawn. His scarred and shackled body swayed limply back and forth with every sweep of the great oar as we, his less fortunate bench-fellows, tugged and strained to keep time to the stroke. Two men had I seen die beside me, yet Death ever passed me by, nay, it seemed rather that despite the pain of stripes, despite the travail and hardship, my strength... more...

SQUIRE NEWCOME. "HANNAH!" The speaker was a tall, pompous-looking man, whose age appeared to verge close upon fifty. He was sitting bolt upright in a high-backed chair, and looked as if it would be quite impossible to deviate from his position of unbending rigidity. Squire Benjamin Newcome, as he was called, in the right of his position as Justice of the Peace, Chairman of the Selectmen, and... more...

SONS OF THE NORTH Three men stood ankle deep in mud on the shore of a jungle river, silently watching a ribbon of smoke drift and dissolve above the somber mass of trees to the northwest. Three men of widely different types they were, yet all cradled in the same far-off northern land. The tallest, lean bodied but broad shouldered, black of hair and gray of eye, held himself in soldierly fashion and... more...

CHAPTER I. YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.  That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.  There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.  That is nothing.  I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or... more...

CHAPTER I. Two Young Friends. At the mouth of the great river of Canton lies a maze of islands large and small, of which the most important is Hongkong on account of its fine harbor. More than half a century ago the English seized upon this island and forced the Chinese to cede it to them. Then it was little more than a barren rock with a low swampy shore on which were a few villages inhabited by poor... more...

1. HOW THE BRIGADIER CAME TO THE CASTLE OF GLOOM[] You do very well, my friends, to treat me with some little reverence, for in honouring me you are honouring both France and yourselves. It is not merely an old, grey-moustached officer whom you see eating his omelette or draining his glass, but it is a fragment of history. In me you see one of the last of those wonderful men, the men who were veterans... more...

'If Diamonds Could Talk' is the sequel to 'His 16th Face' by Stephanie Van Orman. Beth Coldwell has been kidnapped more times than the average person, but now she has been kidnapped by immortals who believe she is immortal too. They have separated her from her darling Christian and trapped her in a castle built inside Tombstone Mountain, where they have given her a task. She is to... more...