Claim Jumpers Author:Stewart Edward White Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VIII AN ADVENTURE IN THE NIGHT After supper that night Bennington found himself unaccountably alone in camp. Old Mizzou had wandered off up the gul... more »ch. Arthur had wandered off down the gulch. The woman had locked herself in her cabin. So, having nothing else to do, he got out the manuscript of Aliris: A Romance of all Time, and read it through carefully from the beginning. To his surprise he found it very poor. Its language was felicitous in some spots, but stilted in most; the erudition was pedantic, and dragged in by the ears; the action was idiotic; and the proportions were padded until they no longer existed as proportions. He was astounded. He began to see that he had misconceived the whole treatment of it. It would have to be written all over again, with the love story as the ruling motif. He felt very capableof doing the love story. He drew some paper toward him and began to write. You see he was already developing. Every time a writer is made to appreciate that his work is poor he has taken a step in advance of it. Although he did not know that was the reason of it, Bennington perceived the deficiencies of Aliris, because he had promised to read it to the girl. He saw it through her eyes. The young man became absorbed in re- describing the heroine with violet eyes. A sudden slamming of the door behind him brought him, startled, to his feet. He laughed, and was about to sit down again, but noticed that the door had remained open. He arose to shut it. Over the trunks of the nearer pines played a strange flickering light, throwing them now into relief, now into shadow. " Strange! " murmured Bennington to himself, and stepped outside to investigate. As he crossed the sill he was seized on either side. He cried out and struggled blindly, but was held...« less