"A Deal in Wheat" is the first and the shortest of these stories by the late Frank Norris. The title, of course, suggests Chicago and The Pit, but the fact is that the stories which have already appeared in magazine form, are with one exception concerned with the gun-firing, cow-punching West of the plains, or the semi-piratic seafaring West of the Pacific Coast, not with the new West of the grain exchange and the gambler in breadstuffs.

They are forceful, dramatic, high-colored tales, done for the most part in the mongrel, garish, yet wonderfully enlivening dialect which fiction has assigned to the cow-punching hero and the three-card monte man. Of the latter not the least is Peg-Leg Smith, who here storms and sins and gets his grim punishment. This Peg-Leg could not endure to hear another man swear, but that he straightway erupted streams of rabid rage and his sidearms spat bullets as a hot frying-pan grease. But, says the story teller, using his lingo:

"This yere prejudice agin profanity is the only thing about this yere Peg-Leg that ain't pizen bad, and that prejudice, you got to know, was just along o' his bein' loco on that one subjeck. Just the same as some gesabos has feelin's agin cats or snakes, or agin seein' a speckled nigger."

An effective thing is the "Memorandum of Sudden Death," a manuscript supposed to be written in the pauses of the tragedy by a man of literature, one of a body of troopers and scouts followed, dogged, surrounded, and picked off by hostile Indians upon the plains. Written so, and found beside the bodies and given to the world just as the doomed man wrote it, it is a thing that readers will remember, a thing surely hard to do, yet, one must think, singularly well done.

For the seafaring tales, they have a charm of their own. They deal gently with the shady doings of the Three Black Crows—undertakers of illicit "propositions" from Alaska to the Horn involving imminent risk of the neck and finances by the Pacific and Oriental Flotation Company of San Francisco, Cyrus Ryder, President. The three smuggle arms to Central American revolutionists with adroit petticoated assistance; they steal otter skins of fabulous price from Russians (first filling the Russians with a wonderful champagne made by the Pacific and Oriental Flotation Company out of Rhine wine, effervescent salts, raisins, rock candy, and alcohol), and sail on the trackless seas of the South Pacific to a nameless island with a 200-year-old skeleton in its closet and a treasure alongside. This is the story of the "Ship that Saw a Ghost"—the story of a two-century-old derelict. A stout steam freighter she was, this ghostseer, the Glarus by name, and thenceforth she lay at the San Francisco docks, "never to smell blue water again or to taste the trades—no pilot to take her out, no Captain to navigate her, no stoker to feed her fires, no salior to walk her decks." For the seafaring man has his fancies—"and the Glarus is suspect. She has seen a ghost." It is a good yarn and there is in it some work after the inspiration of the Ancient Mariner which is as fine of the kind as one often reads. Certainly the reader will carry away in his mind a ghost of his own in the haunting memory of an etching of a lone, lonely sea and the ancient, tattered, crumbling ghost ship rippling the water beneath her rotten bows—moving across the track of it with never a wind astern. The spinal chills and thrills, that mysterious vibration of the nerves which comes upon the touch of the Thing Unseen—incomprehensible, contradictory of logic—these the reader will have as he reads, if he is not a man entirely machine-made. For there is still a skill—and Mr. Norris had it—to remind the most skeptical that there is more in earth and heaven than steam and electricity can move or modern steering wheels govern.

"The Ghost of the Crosstrees," on the contrary, is an explained ghost—a night-robed sleep-walker—sleep-walking being a childish survival in the one of the Three Black Crows—and "The Riding of Filipe" is a Mexican tale of a woman scorned and a good horse that did not fail at need. Which is the prize plot of melodrama.

Altogether they are stories worth while—these of the dead romance of the buccaneer West by this dead romancer of that wonderful episode in civilization.