Transcribers Note: Title and Table of contents Added.
THE IDLER MAGAZINE.
CONTENTS.
AN INGENUE OF THE SIERRAS.
By Bret Harte.
THE MODERN BABYLON.
By Cynicus.
MY FIRST BOOKS.
“UNDERTONES” AND “IDYLS AND LEGENDS OF INVERBURN.”
By Robert Buchanan.
BALDERS BALL.
By P. Von Schönthan.
“LIONS IN THEIR DENS.”
V.—THE LORD LIEUTENANT AT DUBLIN CASTLE.
By Raymond Blathwayt.
THE FEAR OF IT.
By Robert Barr.
MEMOIRS OF A FEMALE NIHILIST.
By Sophie Wassilieff.
MEMOIRS OF A FEMALE NIHILIST.2
By Sophie Wassilieff.
PEOPLE I HAVE NEVER MET.
by Scott Rankin.
MY SERVANT JOHN.
By Archibald Forbes.
THE IDLERS CLUB.
“THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT.”
AN INGENUE OF THE SIERRAS.
Illustrations by A. S. Boyd.
We all held our breath as the coach rushed through the semi-darkness ofGalloper’s Ridge. The vehicle itself was only a huge lumbering shadow;its side-lights were carefully extinguished, and Yuba Bill had justpolitely removed from the lips of an outside passenger even the cigarwith which he had been ostentatiously exhibiting his coolness. For ithad been rumoured that the Ramon Martinez gang of “road agents” were“laying” for us on the second grade, and would time the passage of ourlights across Galloper’s in order to intercept us in the “brush” beyond.If we could cross the ridge without being seen, and so get through thebrush before they reached it, we were safe. If they followed, it wouldonly be a stern chase with the odds in our favour.
The huge vehicle swayed from side to side, rolled, dipped, and plunged,but Bill kept the track, as if, in the whispered words of theExpressman, he could “feel and smell” the road he could nolonger see. We knew that at times we hung perilously over the edge ofslopes that eventually dropped a thousand feet sheer to the tops of thesugar-pines below, but we knew that Bill knew it also. The half visibleheads of the horses, drawn wedge-wise together by the tightened reins,appeared to cleave the darkness like a ploughshare, held between hisrigid hands. Even the hoof-beats of the six horses had fallen into avague, monotonous, distant roll. Then the ridge was crossed, and weplunged into the still blacker obscurity of the brush. Rather we nolonger seemed to move—it w