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- Libros en formato PDF -
 The
Border Legion
Joan Randle
reined in her horse on the crest of the cedar
ridge, and with remorse and dread beginning to
knock at her heart she gazed before her at the
wild and looming mountain range.
“Jim wasn't fooling me,” she said. “He meant it.
He's going straight for the border... Oh, why
did I taunt him!”
It was indeed a wild place, that southern border
of Idaho, and that year was to see the ushering
in of the wildest time probably ever known in
the West. The rush for gold had peopled
California with a horde of lawless men of every
kind and class. And the vigilantes and then the
rich strikes in Idaho had caused a reflux of
that dark tide of humanity. Strange tales of
blood and gold drifted into the camps, and
prospectors and hunters met with many unknown
men.
Joan had quarreled with Jim Cleve, and she was
bitterly regretting it. Joan was twenty years
old, tall, strong, dark. She had been born in
Missouri, where her father had been well-to-do
and prominent, until, like many another man of
his day, he had impeded the passage of a bullet.
Then Joan had become the protegee of an uncle
who had responded to the call of gold; and the
latter part of her life had been spent in the
wilds...
  Desert
Gold
A FACE haunted Cameron—a woman's face. It
was there in the white heart of the dying
campfire; it hung in the shadows that hovered
over the flickering light; it drifted in the
darkness beyond.
This hour, when the day had closed and the
lonely desert night set in with its dead silence,
was one in which Cameron's mind was thronged
with memories of a time long past—of a home back
in Peoria, of a woman he had wronged and lost,
and loved too late. He was a prospector for
gold, a hunter of solitude, a lover of the drear,
rock-ribbed infinitude, because he wanted to be
alone to remember.
A sound disturbed Cameron's reflections. He bent
his head listening. A soft wind fanned the
paling embers, blew sparks and white ashes and
thin smoke away into the enshrouding circle of
blackness. His burro did not appear to be moving
about. The quiet split to the cry of a coyote.
It rose strange, wild, mournful—not the howl of
a prowling upland beast baying the campfire or
barking at a lonely prospector, but the wail of
a wolf, full-voiced, crying out the meaning of
the desert and the night. Hunger throbbed in it—hunger
for a mate, for offspring, for life. When it
ceased, the terrible desert silence smote
Cameron, and the cry echoed in his soul. He and
that wandering wolf were brothers.
Then a sharp clink of metal on stone and soft
pads of hoofs in sand prompted Cameron to reach
for his gun, and to move out of the light of the
waning campfire. He was somewhere along the wild
border line between Sonora and Arizona; and the
prospector who dared the heat and barrenness of
that region risked other dangers sometimes as
menacing...
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