Showing results by narrator "Edmond Mercier" in All Categories

Life on his place outside Burnt Creek in Oregon has become hard for old man Cruze. His daughter in Portland needs 50 dollars badly for an operation, and Cruze doesn't have the money. Then a way seems to come to him. A young fugitive being chased by the sheriff stops at his place. He would be willing to pay the old man 50 dollars to hide him out.

Jim Hunter has been making a go of it for three years on his desert-land homestead. Fighting the desert is no place for a woman, and that was what he had told the woman he loved when he left Portland. But Mary thinks otherwise as she, too, comes to homestead in the high desert.

They came from every corner of the State of Oregon and from adjoining states, rough people and refined, all eager to share in a new prospect of comfort and prosperity. Yet, the cause of this boom was a mere rumor, an unsubstantiated report that the government was going to dam a river in distant hills and construct major canals to irrigate the desert. It could be a land rush, as had happened in the past, or something worse, if the rumor really proved false.