



Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net.

THE LAND OF FROZEN SUNS

A Novel

BY

BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR

Author of "Raw Gold," Etc.




Copyright 1909, BY
STREET & SMITH.

Copyright, 1910, BY
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY.

The Land of Frozen Suns.

Made in U. S. A.




Contents


  - CHAPTER I--THE GENESIS OF TROUBLE
  - CHAPTER II--BY WAY OF THE "NEW MOON"
  - CHAPTER III--WHICH SHOWS THAT THE WORM DOES NOT ALWAYS TURN
  - CHAPTER IV--A FORTHRIGHT FIGHTING-MAN
  - CHAPTER V--THE RELATIVE MERITS OF THE FRYING-PAN AND THE FIRE
  - CHAPTER VI--SLOWFOOT GEORGE
  - CHAPTER VII--THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL
  - CHAPTER VIII--BY WAYS THAT WERE DARK
  - CHAPTER IX--MR. MONTELL
  - CHAPTER X--"THERE'S MONEY IN IT"
  - CHAPTER XI--A TRICK OF THE "TRADE."
  - CHAPTER XII--THE FIRST MOVE
  - CHAPTER XIII--A FORETASTE OF STRONG MEASURES
  - CHAPTER XIV--INTEREST ON A DEBT
  - CHAPTER XV--STRANGERS TWAIN
  - CHAPTER XVI--CLAWS UNSHEATHED
  - CHAPTER XVII--NINE POINTS OF THE LAW
  - CHAPTER XVIII--THE LONG ARM OF THE COMPANY
  - CHAPTER XIX--THE STRENGTH OF MEN--AND THEIR WEAKNESS




CHAPTER I--THE GENESIS OF TROUBLE


Who was it, I wonder, made that sagacious remark about the road to hell
being paved with good intentions? He might have added an amendment to
the effect that there's always a plentiful supply of material for that
much travelled highway. We all contribute, more or less. I know I have
done so. And so did my people before me. My father's intentions were
good, but he didn't live long enough to carry them out. If he hadn't
fallen a victim to an inborn streak of recklessness, a habit of taking
chances,--well, I can't say just how things would have panned out. I'm
not fatalist enough to believe that we crawl or run or soar through our
allotted span of years according to some prearranged scheme which we are
powerless to modify. Oh, no! It's highly probable, however, that if my
father and mother had lived I should have gone into some commercial
pursuit or taken up one of the professions. Either way, I should likely
have pegged along in an uneventful sort of way to the end of the
chapter--lots of men do. Not that I would have taken with enthusiasm to
chasing the nimble dollar for the pure love of catching it, but because
I was slated for something of the sort, and as the twig is bent so is
the tree inclined; a man can't sit down and twiddle his thumbs and
refuse to perform any useful act, because there is no glory in it. The
heroic age has gone a-glimmering down the corridors of time.

As it happened, my feet were set in other paths by force of
circumstances. Only for that the sage-brush country, the very place
where I was born might have remained a terra incognita. I should always
have felt, though, that I'd missed something, for I was ushered into
this vale of tears at the Summer ranch on the Red River of the South.
Sumner _here_ hadn't developed into a cow monarch those days, but he was
on the way. My earliest impressions were all of log and 'dobe buildings,
_of long-horned cattle_, of wild, shaggy-maned horses, and of wilder men
who rode the one and drove the other in masterly fashion. For landscape
there was rolling prairie, and more rolling prairie beyond; and here and
there the eternal brown of it was broken by gray sage-grown flats and
stretches of greasewood--as if Nature had made a feeble effort to break
the monotony. I knew only this until I was big enough to tease for a
pony. I cannot remember seeing a town when I was small. The world to me
was a place of great plains, very still, and hot, and dry, a huddle of
cabins, and corrals, and a little way to the south Red River slinking
over its quicksands--except in time of storm; then it raged.

So that when my father bundled mother and myself off to a place called
St. Louis, where great squadrons of houses stood in geometrical
arrangement over a vast area, I had already begun to look upon things
with the eyes of cattleland. I recollect that when we were settled in a
roomy, old-fashioned house I cried because my mother would not let me go
out to the corral and play.

"There are no corrals in a city, dear," she explained--and I cried the
harder. I could conceive of no joy in a place where I could not go out
to the corrals and have some brown-faced cowpuncher hoist me up on a
gentle horse and let me hold the reins while the pony moved sedately
about.

Left to himself, I think my father would have made a cowman of me, but
mother had known the range when it was a place to try the nerves of
strong men, and she hated it. I didn't know till I was nearly grown that
she had made dad promise when I was born that if the cattle made money
for us, I should never know the plains. She came of an old Southern
family, and her life had been a sheltered one till she met and married
Jack Sumner. And she would have had me walk in pleasant places, as the
men of her family had done--doctors, lawyers, planters, and such. The
life was too hard, too much of an elemental struggle, she said--and I
was to be saved some of the knocks that my dad had taken in the
struggling years. Poor mother mine--her son was the son of his father,
I'm afraid. But Sumner _pere_ made good on his promise when the Sumner
herds fattened his bank account sufficiently; and I gyrated through
school, with college and a yet-to-be-determined career looming on the
horizon.

So my childish memories of the great open, that lies naked to the
sun-glare and the chilling breath of the _northers_ year on year, grew
fainter and more like something of which I had dreamed. Dad would come
home occasionally, stay a day or two, perhaps a week, sometimes even a
month; but my mother never went west of the Mississippi--nor did I. I
often plagued them to let me go to the ranch during vacation, but they
evidently considered it best to keep me away from the round-ups and
horse-breaking and such, till I was old enough to see that there was
another side to the life besides the sunshiny, carefree one that makes
an irresistible appeal to a youngster.

And then, just a week after my twentieth birthday, my dad, slow-voiced,
easy-going old Jack Sumner rode his horse into the smiling Red and
drowned under the eyes of twenty men.

I was sitting on our front steps grouching about the heat when the
messenger brushed by me with the telegram in his hand. Mother signed for
it, and he ran down the steps whistling, and went about his business.
There was no sound within. I had no hint of trouble, till a maid
screamed. Then, I rushed in. Mother was drooping over the arm of a
Morris chair, and the bit of yellow paper lay on the rug where it had
fluttered from her hand. I carried her to a couch, and called a doctor.
But he could do nothing. Her heart was weak, he said, and might have
stopped any time; the shock had merely hastened her end.

I'm going to pass lightly over the week that followed. I was just a kid,
remember, and I took it pretty hard. It was my first speaking
acquaintance with death. A few of my mother's people came, and when it
was over with I went to Virginia with an uncle, a kindly, absent-minded,
middle-aged bachelor. But I couldn't settle down. For a week or ten days
I fidgeted about the sleepy Southern village, and then I bade my uncle
an abrupt good-bye and started for St. Louis. Little as I knew of
business and legal matters I was aware that now the Sumner herds and
ranches were mine, and I had a hankering to know where I stood. Except
that there was a ranch and cattle in Texas I knew nothing of my father's
business. It didn't even occur to me, at first, that I was a minor and
