The Spoilers

By REX E. BEACH
With Four Illustrations By CLARENCE F. UNDERWOOD
A. L. BURT COMPANY, Publishers NEW YORK.
Copyright, 1905, by Rex E. Beach. —— All rights reserved. Published April, 1906.
THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED TO MY MOTHER

G LENISTER gazed out over the harbor, agleam with the lights of anchored ships, then up at the crenelated mountains, black against the sky. He drank the cool air burdened with its taints of the sea, while the blood of his boyhood leaped within him.
“Oh, it’s fine—fine,” he murmured, “and this is my country—my country, after all, Dex. It’s in my veins, this hunger for the North. I grow. I expand.”
“Careful you don’t bust,” warned Dextry. “I’ve seen men get plumb drunk on mountain air. Don’t expand too strong in one spot.” He went back abruptly to his pipe, its villanous fumes promptly averting any danger of the air’s too tonic quality.
“Gad! What a smudge!” sniffed the younger man. “You ought to be in quarantine.”
“I’d ruther smell like a man than talk like a kid. You desecrate the hour of meditation with rhapsodies on nature when your æsthetics ain’t honed up to the beauties of good tobacco.”