The Project Gutenberg EBook of Back to God's Country and Other Stories, by
James Oliver Curwood
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Title: Back to God's Country and Other Stories
Author: James Oliver Curwood
Posting Date: August 11, 2009 [EBook #4539]
Release Date: October, 2003
First Posted: February 5, 2002
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BACK TO GOD'S COUNTRY ***
Produced by Dianne Bean. HTML version by Al Haines.
BACK TO GOD'S COUNTRY AND OTHER STORIES
BY
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
CONTENTS
Back to God's Country
The Yellow-Back
The Fiddling Man
L'ange
The Case of Beauvais
The Other Man's Wife
The Strength of Men
The Match
The Honor of Her People
Bucky Severn
His First Penitent
Peter God
The Mouse
BACK TO GOD'S COUNTRY
When Shan Tung, the long-cued Chinaman from Vancouver, started up the
Frazer River in the old days when the Telegraph Trail and the
headwaters of the Peace were the Meccas of half the gold-hunting
population of British Columbia, he did not foresee tragedy ahead of
him. He was a clever man, was Shan Tung, a cha-sukeed, a very devil in
the collecting of gold, and far-seeing. But he could not look forty
years into the future, and when Shan Tung set off into the north, that
winter, he was in reality touching fire to the end of a fuse that was
to burn through four decades before the explosion came.
With Shan Tung went Tao, a Great Dane. The Chinaman had picked him up
somewhere on the coast and had trained him as one trains a horse. Tao
was the biggest dog ever seen about the Height of Land, the most
powerful, and at times the most terrible. Of two things Shan Tung was
enormously proud in his silent and mysterious oriental way--of Tao, the
dog, and of his long, shining cue which fell to the crook of his knees
when he let it down. It had been the longest cue in Vancouver, and
therefore it was the longest cue in British Columbia. The cue and the
dog formed the combination which set the forty-year fuse of romance and
tragedy burning. Shan Tung started for the El Dorados early in the
winter, and Tao alone pulled his sledge and outfit. It was n
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