E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) THE BONDBOY * * * * * _By G. W. Ogden_ Trail's End Claim Number One The Land of Last Chance The Rustler of Wind River The Duke of Chimney Butte The Flockmaster of Poison Creek * * * * * THE BONDBOY by GEORGE W. OGDEN Chicago A. C. McClurg & Co. 1922 Copyright A. C. McClurg & Co. 1922 Published October, 1922 Copyrighted in Great Britain Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS I. Delivered Into Bondage 1 II. A Dry-Salt Man 21 III. The Spark in the Clod 47 IV. A Stranger at the Gate 66 V. The Secret of the Clover 84 VI. Blood 99 VII. Deliverance 114 VIII. Will He Tell? 126 IX. The Sealed Envelope 152 X. Let Him Hang 166 XI. Peter's Son 171 XII. The Sunbeam on the Wall 188 XIII. Until the Day Break 210 XIV. Deserted 228 XV. The State vs. Newbolt 241 XVI. "She Cometh Not" He Said 249 XVII. The Blow of a Friend 259 XVIII. A Name and a Message 276 XIX. The Shadow of a Dream 304 XX. "The Penalty Is Death!" 311 XXI. Ollie Speaks 325 XXII. A Summons of the Night 341 XXIII. Lest I Forget 359 The Bondboy CHAPTER I DELIVERED INTO BONDAGE Sarah Newbolt enjoyed in her saturnine, brooding way the warmth of April sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to soften the brown austerity of the dead winter earth. Beside her kitchen wall the pink cones of rhubarb were showing, and the fat buds of the lilacs, which clustered coppicelike in her dooryard, were ready to unlock and flare forth leaves. On the porch with its southern exposure she sat in her low, splint-bottomed rocker, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees. The sun tickled her shoulders through her linsey dress, and pictured her, grotesquely foreshortened, upon the nail-drawn, warped, and beaten floor. Her hands, nursing her cheeks, chin pivoted in their palms, were large and toil-distorted, great-jointed like a man's, and all the feminine softness with which nature had endowed her seemed to have been overcome by the masculine cast of frame and face which the hardships of her life had developed.