Peter B. Kyne

“ As for Donna, like most women, she was content to linger in that delightful state of bliss which precedes marriage. Never having known real happiness before, she was, for the present at least, incapable of imagining a more profound joy than walking arm in arm in the moonlit patio with the man she loved. Without the adobe walls, the zephyr lashed the sage and whirled the sand with fiendish disregard of human happiness, but within the Hat Ranch enclosure Donna Corblay knew that she had found a paradise, and she was content. ”

“ The Trinidad rose to another sea. It broke over her bows and whirled away toward the Golden Gate, racing madly for the still waters under the lee of Point Bonita. McNaughton looked back and saw the pilot-house and the life-rafts of the Falls o' Clyde go overboard as a sea broke over her. The white, boiling waters surged over the decks of the Trinidad, and a scream echoed through the dying ship. McNaughton saw the body of a man disappear over the starboard quarter. For a moment the white face stared up at him from a halo of foam, and was gone. ”

“ Donald McKaye was not unintelligent. He was a man, grown, with all a man's passions, with all the caution to be expected in one of his class. If he still loved her sufficiently, following a period of mature deliberation and fierce opposition from his people, to offer her honorable marriage, would she not be a fool to cast away such a priceless gift? How few men know love so strong, so tender, so unselfish, that they do not shrink from sharing with the object of their love, the odium which society has always set upon the woman taken in adultery. ”

“ What manner of fool is the woman who would strive to hold a man whose love has grown cold and dim like the stars at dawn? When you weary of me, Dan Pritchard, you will tell me; then, because I shall always love you, I will prove my love; I will send you away with a smile and a kiss. Ah, sweetheart, will that day ever come? I think not. I think I shall never grow old or stale or intolerable to you.”
“Never,” he promised, profoundly touched by her sweetness, her candor and amazing magnetism. “You are driving me mad with longing for you, Tamea.” ”

“ Is it any harder to die just because war has become more terrible—more deadly? Oh, Skinner, Skinner! To be young and tall and strong and whirled in the cycle of vast events—to play a man's part in a glorious undertaking—to feel that I have enriched the world with my efforts, however humble, or with my body revitalized the soil made fallow by a ravishing monster. I feel, Skinner—I feel so much and can do so little. ”

“ Would you, if you were a white farmer, care to compete with the Japanese farmers of this valley? Would you care to live in a rough board shack, subsist largely on rice, labor from daylight to dark and force your wife and daughter to labor with you in the fields? Would you care to live in a kennel and never read a book or take an interest in public affairs or thrill at a sunset or consider that you really ought to contribute a dollar toward starving childhood in Europe? ”

“ The Worst Bad Man, whose courage, for all his deviltry, had its limitations, went and sat down on the tongue of the wagon and tried to think. But scourged with the horror of this most terrible of human travail, he fled up the arroyo out of hearing. On the top of one of the little black volcanic hills, from which eminence he could look down on the wagon, he stood, active, alert, like a mountain sheep on guard, and beckoned to his friends to join him. The Youngest Bad Man obeyed his frantic signals, but The Wounded Bad Man stayed at the wagon. ”

“ United we stand, divided we fall, Sinclair; and let there be no moaning of the bar when a Cardigan puts out to sea.”
Smiling, he rose from his desk, patted the bewildered Sinclair on the latter's grizzled head, and then reached for his hat. “I'm dining out to-night, Sinclair, and I wouldn't be a kill-joy at the feast, for a ripe peach. Your confounded figures might make me gloomy; so we'll just reserve discussion of them till to-morrow morning. Be a sport, Sinclair, and for once in your life beat the six o'clock whistle. ”

“ Think of the good you can do with the proceeds of the evil you have done! Ah, Carey, Carey! There's so much fun in just living, and I'm afraid you've never been young. You've never dreamed! And you've never had a friend that loved you for what you were. Do you know why, Carey? Because you weren't worth loving. You have received from the world to date just what you put into it—envy and greed and hate and malice and selfishness, and at your passing the curses of your people will be your portion. ”

“ Born to love and be loved, Nan Brent's soul beat against her environment even as a wild bird, captured and loosed in a room, beats against the window-pane. From the moment she had felt within her the vague stirrings of womanhood, she had been wont to gaze upon the blue-back hills to the east, to the horizon out west, wondering what mysteries lay beyond, and yearning to encounter them. ”

“ She viewed it with mixed feelings of awe, delight and a half sensed feeling of apprehension, for all that enthralling vision impressed her with the thought that beyond the indentation which her father called to her was the Golden Gate, lay another world of romance, of dreams, curiosity-compelling, palpitant with something of the same warmth that had nurtured Tamea in the little known, seldom visited and uncharted island kingdom under the Southern Cross. ”

“ San Pasqual is such a weather-beaten, sad, abject little town that one might readily experience surprise that the trains even condescend to stop there. It squats in the sand a few miles south of Tehachapi pass, hemmed in by mountain ranges ocher-tinted where near by, mellowed by distance into gorgeous shades of turquoise and deep maroon. They are very far away, these mountains, even though their outlines are so distinct that they appear close at hand. The desert atmosphere has cast a kindly spell upon them, softening their hellish perspective into lines of beauty in certain lights. ”