Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BUSTER BILL The Boy Hero of the Camp I THE HERO OF GOLD RUN jjECKON it ain 't no use. Nobody 'like me could do it, nohow. I reckon I'll just ha veto giveit up." Whatever it might be, the idea of giving it up troubled him deeply, and he thrust his fat, brown hands into his thick mop of yellow curls in a very serious way as he sat on the quartz ledge on the hill above the gulch. Buster Bill was one of the pioneers of Gold Run, and he had been a successful miner, all things considered, but his wardrobe was as far away from received ideas of style as was his grammar. His dimpled knees were smiling out through the openings in Paddy Noonan's discarded overalls, and these were as nearly a fit as was Keno Dick's cast-off "jumper," forty inches around the waist, or even the sombrero which Dick had thrown away for fear of being seen with it on by— Well, that is where Buster Bill's present difficulty came upon him. When the first rich claim at Gold Run had been struck, and the news of it came down from the mountains in the quick, mysterious way peculiar to such news, the rush to the diggings was accompanied, for a rarity, by a- woman. She was a "widdy-woman," and with her was a child, and the child was Buster Bill, and he became the idol of the camp. He was a fat, freckled, jolly, happy- go-lucky little fellow, coming and going at his own will, and when he failed to be seen of a morning making his round of inspection among the claims, something like a committee of investigation might be expected to call at his mother's cabin. At first he had a small claim of his own, and had worked it. He had even panned out a small pinch of dust, to the boundless admiration of the older miners, but inspection duty suited his tastes better than mere gulch digging. At the end of a few we...