Achmed Abdullah

“ Men out there in the Northwest spoke of "passing the Yankee Doodle Glory" as men in other places speak of "passing the buck"; and now laughing Tom Graves was the owner.
But though he had had half-a-dozen chances of palming it off on newcomers fresh from the East he had always stoutly refused to do so. ”

“ And Tom Graves had laughed and had taken the title certificate–the mine was patented–in payment of Dixon Harris' gambling debt.
The Yankee Doodle Glory was a standing joke in the community. It had had a variegated, picturesque, and not altogether honest career. It had been sold and re-sold to capitalists from Boston, London, Minneapolis, and New York, abandoned and picked up again, disposed of at auction in Spokane amidst the roaring laughter of those present for thirty-five cents cash ("an' you're paying damned high for what you're getting!" the auctioneer had added facetiously) ”

“ Fourteen miles beyond, an hour and a half's ride if the pony was as keen as the man, was Woodfell, a one-horse, one-man homestead of drab, slat-built house, splintering, zig-zag fence, rickety corral, and a brown, hopeless blotch of illy tilled fields. ”

“ Johnson, the squatter, pay more or less gracefully that flaxen-haired individual's habitual overcharge for a meal consisting of bread mixed in the flour bag and baked in the frying-pan, inky, boiled coffee, stringy bacon that tasted of fish, and rice pudding remarkable for its shortcomings as to raisins, and resume his journey on foot into the Hoodoo mining district. Tom Graves was easily moved to laughter. ”

“ Wealth that comes to you suddenly after you've given up hope and are mighty near to blowing off yer head with a stick o' powder! Why, by the Immortal and Solemnly Attested Heck!"–this was his pet swear word–"I tell you I have ranged these here hills since I was knee-high to a wood louse and I've never seen such a vein of–"
"Say! What is a vein?"
"Gosh A'mighty! Go to bed, Tom, before I brain you with my skillet. Only take this bit o' information along and hug it in yer dreams: You've got enough gold down there in the Yankee Doodle Glory to buy enough what you want!" ”

“ He was a typical Man on Horseback, an atavistic throwback to an earlier age when men rode free and large, and before steam and electricity and machinery came to cumber, some say to lighten, the world's burden. ”

“ Of course you don't know the hills as I do. You can't know–oh–the struggle, the fight, the treachery, the damned cheating deceit that's in them rocks. But," wagging his patriarchal beard, "nor can you know the promise of them hills. ”