This classic tale from the pulp magazines of the early 20th century originally appeared in "All-Story Cavalier Weekly" (Dec. 12, 1914 issue). A tale of rough-and-tumble frontier life and justice, it is a unique piece of Americana. It begins: "Harsh, clamant, wild, the braying of the long tin horn that hung by a rawhide lashing from the tamarack on the American shore of the Madawaska ferry hurled echoes over the far reaches of the river. At its second blaring call, imperatively eloquent of deadly haste, the door of the little ferry-shack swung wide and a girl looked out a girl clad strangely and for rough toil, in faded blue overalls and a checkered mackinaw of felted stuff. For a moment she stood there in the fading light of that chill October evening, peering out across the waters that slid away, cold, dark, foam-streaked, toward the tumbling whirls of Tobique Rapids, four miles below -- the white-lashed, thundering leap whose sullen roar never by day or night was still from shuddering through that northern air..."
This classic tale from the pulp magazines of the early 20th century originally appeared in "All-Story Cavalier Weekly" (Dec. 12, 1914 issue). A tale of rough-and-tumble frontier life and justice, it is a unique piece of Americana. It begins: "Harsh, clamant, wild, the braying of the long tin horn that hung by a rawhide lashing from the tamarack on the American shore of the Madawaska ferry hurled echoes over the far reaches of the river. At its second blaring call, imperatively eloquent of deadly haste, the door of the little ferry-shack swung wide and a girl looked out a girl clad strangely and for rough toil, in faded blue overalls and a checkered mackinaw of felted stuff. For a moment she stood there in the fading light of that chill October evening, peering out across the waters that slid away, cold, dark, foam-streaked, toward the tumbling whirls of Tobique Rapids, four miles below -- the white-lashed, thundering leap whose sullen roar never by day or night was still from shuddering through that northern air..."