Dutch Courage and Other Stories

A collection of very early stories published posthumously, with a preface by his wife Charmian.DUTCH COURAGE (excerpt)'Just our luck!'Gus Lafee finished wiping his hands and sullenlythrew the towel upon the rocks. His attitude was one of deepdejection. The light seemed gone out of the day and the glory fromthe golden sun. Even the keen mountain air was devoid of relish, andthe early morning no longer yielded its customary zest.'Just our luck!' Gus repeated, this timeavowedly for the edification of another young fellow who was busilyengaged in sousing his head in the water of the lake.'What are you grumbling about, anyway?'Hazard Van Dorn lifted a soap-rimmed face questioningly. His eyeswere shut. 'What's our luck?''Look there!' Gus threw a moody glanceskyward. 'Some duffer's got ahead of us. We've been scooped,that's all!'Hazard opened his eyes, and caught a fleetingglimpse of a white flag waving arrogantly on the edge of a wall ofrock nearly a mile above his head. Then his eyes closed with a snap,and his face wrinkled spasmodically. Gus threw him the towel, anduncommiseratingly watched him wipe out the offending soap. He felttoo blue himself to take stock in trivialities.Hazard groaned.'Does it hurt-much?' Gus queried,coldly, without interest, as if it were no more than his duty to askafter the welfare of his comrade.'I guess it does,' responded thesuffering one.'Soap's pretty strong, eh?-Noticed itmyself.'''Tisn't the soap. It's-it's that!'He opened his reddened eyes and pointed toward the innocent whitelittle flag. 'That's what hurts.'...About Jack London:Jack London (1876-1916), was an American author and a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction. He was one of the first Americans to make a lucrative career exclusively from writing. London was self-educated. He taught himself in the public library, mainly just by reading books. In 1898, he began struggling seriously to break into print, a struggle memorably described in his novel, Martin Eden (1909). Jack London was fortunate in the timing of his writing career. He started just as new printing technologies enabled lower-cost production of magazines. This resulted in a boom in popular magazines aimed at a wide public, and a strong market for short fiction. In 1900, he made $2,500 in writing, the equivalent of about $75,000 today. His career was well under way. Among his famous works are: Children of the Frost (1902), The Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea Wolf (1904), The Game (1905), White Fang (1906), The Road (1907), Before Adam (1907), Adventure (1911), and The Scarlet Plague (1912).