The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Black Pearl, by Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

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Title: The Black Pearl

Author: Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

Release Date: December 30, 2005 [eBook #17418]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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THE BLACK PEARL

by

MRS. WILSON WOODROW

Author of "Sally Salt," "The New Missioner," Etc.

Illustrated

[Illustration: "'I'm feelin' particularly good right now.'" (Page 181)]

New York and London
D. Appleton and Company
1912
Copyright, 1912, by
D. Appleton and Company
Published August, 1912
Printed in the United States of America

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"'I'm feelin' particularly good right now'"--(Frontispiece)

"I'll show you what I'll do'" 102

"There stood the Black Pearl alone" 244

"Holding cautiously to a little branch, she bent over him" 302

THE BLACK PEARL

CHAPTER I

It was just at sunset that the train which had crawled across the desert
drew up, puffing and panting, before the village of Paloma, not many
miles from the Salton Sea. After a moment's delay, one lone passenger
descended. Paloma was not an important station.

Rudolf Hanson, the one passenger, whom either curiosity or business had
brought thither, stood on the platform of the little station looking
about him. To the right of him, beyond the village, blooming like an
oasis from the irrigation afforded by the artesian wells, rose the
mountains, the foothills green and dimpled, the slopes with their massed
shadows of pines and oaks climbing upward and gashed with deep purple
canons