A young boy must rescue a couple trapped in a mining gondola 200 feet above the Sacramento River, and amidst a driving rainstorm.
The Banks of the Sacramento
Old Stories
Classic short stories and short fiction in the public domain in convenient, easy to enjoy packaging. Take an old story with you wherever you go and discover more here every weekday.
Shorty and the Plute
Notice any gold dust on my back? No? Well it’s a wonder there ain’t, for I’ve been up against the money bags so close I expect you can find eagle prints all over me. That’s what it is to build up a rep. Looks like all the fat wads in New York was gettin’ to know about Shorty McCabe, and how I’m a sure cure for everything that ails ‘em. You see, I no sooner take hold of one down and outer, sweat the high livin’ out of him, and fix him up like new with a private course of [Read More]
A Hedonist
Rupert K. Vaness remains freshly in my mind because he was so fine and large, and because he summed up in his person and behavior a philosophy which, budding before the war, hibernated during that distressing epoch, and is now again in bloom. He was a New Yorker addicted to Italy. One often puzzled over the composition of his blood. From his appearance, it was rich, and his name fortified the conclusion. What the K. stood for, however, I never learned; the three possibilities were equally intriguing. Had he a strain of Highlander with Kenneth or Keith; a drop of [Read More]
Dr Manette’s Manuscript
“I, Alexandre Manette, unfortunate physician, native of Beauvais, and afterwards resident in Paris, write this melancholy paper in my doleful cell in the Bastille, during the last month of the year, 1767. I write it at stolen intervals, under every difficulty. I design to secrete it in the wall of the chimney, where I have slowly and laboriously made a place of concealment for it. Some pitying hand may find it there, when I and my sorrows are dust. “These words are formed by the rusty iron point with which I write with difficulty in scrapings of soot and charcoal [Read More]
Lost in the Fog
“Down with your helm! You’ll have us hard and fast aground!” My acquaintance with Captain Booden was at that time somewhat limited, and if possible I knew less of the difficult and narrow exit from Bolinas Bay than I did of Captain Booden. So with great trepidation I jammed the helm hard down, and the obedient little Lively Polly fell off easily, and we were over the bar and gliding gently along under the steep bluff of the Mesa, whose rocky edge, rising sheer from the beach and crowned with dry grass, rose far above the pennon of the little [Read More]
Another Dog
Do not tell me dogs cannot talk. I know better. I saw it all myself. It was at Sterzing, that most picturesque of all the Tyrolean villages on the Italian slope of the Brenner, with its long, single street, zigzagged like a straggling path in the snow,—perhaps it was laid out in that way,—and its little open square, with shrine and rude stone fountain, surrounded by women in short skirts and hobnailed shoes, dipping their buckets. On both sides of this street ran queer arcades sheltering shops, their doorways piled with cheap stuffs, fruit, farm implements, and the like, and [Read More]
The Father’s Hand
The Dean and I were sitting after dinner discussing the shortage of students at Oxford since the war began. “You have no idea,” he was saying, “how strange it is to lecture to a class of four or five when one has been accustomed to forty or fifty. This morning, for instance….” “Well, Dean,” I put in, “after the war there will be no lectures on Latin poetry. The times are changing.” The old man threw back his head, and his silvery beard waved in the candle-light. “Listen,” he began, “you remember the passage where a father was trying to [Read More]
At Isham’s
It was a place where men went who liked to talk of curious things. It was not, of course, advertised as that; there was no sign to the public saying as much. Indeed, the only sign of any sort said “Wines, Ales, and Liquors,” just below the name “Isham.” But, nevertheless, that is what it distinctively was—a place where men went who liked to talk of curious things. It was a curious place to look at, too, in a way—the wrong way. It was a three-story house among houses fifteen, twenty, and thirty stories high; it was a house sixty [Read More]
The Hollow Column (Told by the Tax Collector)
“Every man’s fate is fore-ordained,” said the tax-collector, reflectively stroking his beard. “Although we may not understand it at the moment each particular event that happens is simply a means prepared for some destined end that may be many years remote in time. Vishnu the Preserver saved the life of the little maid of Jhalnagor so that her father’s life might later on be saved. But none can read the future, so that we are all blindly doing the things of to-day without knowing their real bearing on the things of a far-away to-morrow. And one man can make or [Read More]
The Other Woman
“I am in love with my wife,” he said—a superfluous remark, as I had not questioned his attachment to the woman he had married. We walked for ten minutes and then he said it again. I turned to look at him. He began to talk and told me the tale I am now about to set down. The thing he had on his mind happened during what must have been the most eventful week of his life. He was to be married on Friday afternoon. On Friday of the week before he got a telegram announcing his appointment to a [Read More]