Raw Gold

Raw Gold, by Bertrand W. Sinclair

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Title: Raw Gold A Novel
Author: Bertrand W. Sinclair
Illustrator: Clarence H. Rowe
Release Date: June 12, 2006 [EBook #18563]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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[Illustration: HICKS DREW HIS AND SLAPPED ME OVER THE HEAD WITH IT, EVEN AS MY FINGER CURLED ON THE TRIGGER.
Frontispiece. Page 161.]

RAW GOLD
A NOVEL
BY
BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR
Illustrations by CLARENCE H. ROWE
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Copyright, 1907, by STREET & SMITH
Copyright, 1908, by G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
Issued June, 1908
Raw Gold

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Long Arm of the Law 7
II. A Reminiscent Hour 18
III. Birds of Prey 30
IV. A Tale Half Told 59
V. Mounted Again 50
VI. Stony Crossing 58
VII. Thirty Days in Irons 69
VIII. Lyn 85
IX. An Idle Afternoon 103
X. The Vanishing Act, and the Fruits Thereof 116
XI. The Gentleman Who Rode in the Lead 130
XII. We Lose Again 146
XIII. Outlawed 163
XIV. A Close Call 179
XV. Piegan Takes a Hand 197
XVI. In the Camp of the Enemy 214
XVII. A Master-stroke of Villainy 226
XVIII. Honor Among Thieves 240
XIX. The Bison 251
XX. The Mouth of Sage Creek 258
XXI. An Elemental Ally 271
XXII. Speechless Hicks 283
XXIII. The Spoils of War 294
XXIV. The Pipe of Peace 303

ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE
Hicks drew his and slapped me over the head with it, even as my finger curled on the trigger Frontispiece 161
Bedded in the soft earth underneath lay the slim buckskin sacks 159
"There's been too much blood shed over that wretched gold already. Let them have it" 212
A war for the open road against an enemy whose only weapon was his unswerving bulk 256

RAW GOLD.
CHAPTER I.
THE LONG ARM OF THE LAW.
How many of us, I wonder, can look back over the misty, half-forgotten years and not see a few that stand out clear and golden, sharp-cut against the sky-line of memory? Years that we wish we could live again, so that we might revel in every full-blooded hour. For we so seldom get the proper focus on things until we look at them through the clarifying telescope of Time; and then one realizes with a pang that he can't back-track into the past and take his old place in the passing show.
Would we, if we could? It's an idle question, I know; wise men and musty philosophers say that regrets are foolish. But I speak for myself only when I say that I would gladly wheedle old, gray-bearded Tempus into making the wheels click backward till I could see again the buffalo-herds darkening the green of Northwestern prairies. They and the blanket Indian have passed, and the cowpuncher and Texas longhorns that replaced them will soon be little more than a vivid memory. Already the man with the plow is tearing up the brown sod that was a stamping-ground for each in turn; the wheat-fields have doomed the sage-brush, and truck-farms line the rivers where the wild cattle and the elk came down to drink.
It was a big life while it lasted--primitive, exhilarating, spiced with dangers that added zest to the game; the petty, sordid things of life only came in on the iron trail. There was no place for them in the old West, the dead-and-gone West that will soon be forgotten.
I expect nearly everybody between the Arctic Circle and the Isthmus of Panama has heard more or less of the Northwest Mounted Police. They're changing with the years, like everything else in this one-time buffalo country, but when Canada sent them out to keep law and order in a territory that was a City of Refuge for a lot of tough people who had played their string out south of the line, they were, as a dry old codger said about the Indian as a scalp-lifter, naturally fitted for the task. And it was no light task, then, for six hundred men to keep the peace on a thousand miles of frontier.
It doesn't seem long ago, but it was in '74 that they filed down the gangway of a Missouri River boat, walking as straight and stiff as if every mother's son of them had a ramrod under his tunic, and out on a rickety wharf that was groaning under the weight of a king's ransom in baled buffalo-hides.
"Huh!" old Piegan Smith grunted in my ear. "Look at 'em, with their solemn faces. There'll be heaps uh fun in the Cypress Hills country when they get t' runnin' the whisky-jacks out. Ain't they a queer-lookin' bunch?"
They were