Author:  Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

Release Date:  December 30, 2005 [eBook #17418]

Language:  English

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THE BLACK PEARL

by

MRS. WILSON WOODROW

Author of “Sally Salt,” “The New Missioner,” Etc.

Illustrated

[Illustration:  “‘I’m feelin’ particularly good right now.’” (Page 181)]

New York and London
D. Appleton and Company
1912
Copyright, 1912, by
D. Appleton and Company
Published August, 1912
Printed in the United States of America

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

     “‘I’m feelin’ particularly good right now’”—­(Frontispiece)

     “I’ll show you what I’ll do’” 102

     “There stood the Black Pearl alone” 244

     “Holding cautiously to a little branch, she bent over him” 302

THE BLACK PEARL

CHAPTER I

It was just at sunset that the train which had crawled across the desert drew up, puffing and panting, before the village of Paloma, not many miles from the Salton Sea.  After a moment’s delay, one lone passenger descended.  Paloma was not an important station.

Rudolf Hanson, the one passenger, whom either curiosity or business had brought thither, stood on the platform of the little station looking about him.  To the right of him, beyond the village, blooming like an oasis from the irrigation afforded by the artesian wells, rose the mountains, the foothills green and dimpled, the slopes with their massed shadows of pines and oaks climbing upward and gashed with deep purple canons, and above them the great white, solemn peaks, austere and stately guardians of the desert which stretched away and away, its illimitable distances lost at last in the horizon line.

Hanson, of the far west, was used to magnificent scenic effects, but the desert that sparkled like the gold of man’s eternal quest, that lay with its sentinel hills enfolded and encompassed in color, colors that seemed as if some spinner of the sunset courts wove forever fresh combinations and sent these ethereal tapestries out to float over the wide spaces of the wilderness—­this caused him to catch his breath and exclaim.