Fiction Books

We lived on the coast of California, on the Spanish grant my grandfather had purchased from the mission which still stands, deserted and crumbling, in the Santa Brigida Valley. Our house, built long before the Civil War, overlooked the lower end of the valley, from a knoll above the salt marshes...

Two men sat conversing in the railroad station. One was middle-aged, with grizzled hair and mustache, tall and big-limbed, but with no extra flesh on his massive frame. His face was long-jowled and determined looking, and his keen gray eyes were overhung with bushy brows, which were often drawn...

The blazing sun of a Texas afternoon turned air and drab brown earth to gold. Not a breath stirred the huge white stocking that served as a wind-indicator on the airdrome of the McMullen Flight of the Air Service border patrol.

He was a tall, powerfully-built man, aged probably forty-five years, of a rugged, yet intelligent and almost handsome cast of features; while the rough "home-made" garments that he wore disguised without hiding the splendid contour of his form. There was the slightest possible tinge of the...

There are Alards buried in Winchelsea church—they lie in the south aisle on their altar tombs, with lions at their feet. At least one of them went to the Crusades and lies there cross-legged—the first Gervase Alard, Admiral of the Cinque Ports and Bailiff of Winchelsea, a man of mighty stature.

The sun was sinking towards the Borneo mountains. The forest and the sea, inscrutable to the bullying noon, relented in this discreeter light, revealing secrets of green places. Birds began to rustle in the big trees; the shaking of broad leaves in the undergrowth betrayed the movement of beasts...

The November sun that had been red and threatening all day, slowly disappeared behind a cloud bank. The wind that had held steadily to the south for a week, now shifted suddenly to the northeast, coming as a furious blast. In a moment, it seemed, the mild Indian Summer breeze was changed to a...

Four Americans were sitting in the smoking-room of a Paris hotel. One of them was a grizzled, middle-aged man, who sat silent and apart from the others and consumed his heavy black cigar with a somewhat gloomy air. The other three were briskly talking.

Die Musik kam über die Via de Condotti, als Helge Gram in der Dämmerung gerade in die Straße einbog. Die Melodie eines altbekannten Gassenhauers ertönte in sinnlos rasendem Tempo wie eine wilde Fanfare. Und die schwarzen kleinen Soldaten stürmten in dem kalten Nachmittag vorüber, als seien...

The very stout chap with the freckled, good-natured face was Tubby Hopkins. Sim Jeffords was of rather lean build, with a shrewd look in his keen eyes; Andy Bowles was the one whose cheeks every now and then expanded as though in imagination he might be practicing some new bugle call, for Andy had...