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Novels and Stories of Bret Harte (2); Mrs. Skagg's Husbands and Other Stories. the Story of a Mine
Novels and Stories of Bret Harte Mrs Skagg's Husbands and Other Stories the Story of a Mine - 2 Author:Bret Harte Volume: 2 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1905 Original Publisher: Jefferson Press Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com wh... more »ere you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: THE PEINCESS BOB AND HEE FEIENDS. SHE was a Klamath Indian. Her title was, I think, a compromise between her claim as daughter of a chief, and gratitude to her earliest white protector, whose name, after the Indian fashion, she had adopted. " Bob " Walker had taken her from the breast of her dead mother at a time when the sincere volunteer soldiery of the California frontier were impressed with the belief that extermination was the manifest destiny of the Indian race. He had with difficulty restrained the noble zeal of his compatriots long enough to convince them that the exemption of one Indian baby would not invalidate this theory. And he took her to his home, -- a pastoral clearing on the banks of the Salmon Eiver, -- where she was cared foi after a frontier fashion. Before she was nine years old, she had exhausted the scant kindliness of the thin, overworked Mrs. Walker. As a playfellow of the young Walkers she was unreliable; as a nurse for the baby she was inefficient. She lost the former in the trackless depths of a redwood forest; she basely abandoned the latter in an extemporized cradle, hang'ing like a chrysalis to a convenient bough. She lied and she stole, -- two unpardonable sins in a frontier community, where truth was a necessity and provisions were the only property. Worse than this, the outskirts of the clearing were sometimes haunted by blanketed tatterdemalions with whom she had mysterious confidences. Mr. Walker more than once regretted his indiscreet humanity; but she presently relieved him of responsibility, and possibly of bloodguil...« less