It was early afternoon. Near by, the smaller hills shimmered in the radiant warmth of late spring, the brownness of their foliage and boulders merging gradually upward to the green of the spruces and pines of the higher mountains, which in turn gave way before the somber blacks and whites of the main range, where yet the snow lingered from the clutch of winter, where the streams ran brown with the down-flow of the continental divide, where every cluster of mountain foliage sheltered a mound of white, in jealous conflict with the sun. The mountains are tenacious of their vicious traits; they...

Courtney Ryley Cooper (1886 -1940) was an American circus performer, publicist and writer. Many of his 30 books focused on crime. He was also an expert on the circus. Cooper was a circus clown, journalist and marine before becoming a writer. Coopers work was much admired by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who once said he is "the best informed man on crime in the U. S." An excerpt from the beginning of The Cross-Cut reads, "Loneliness, rather than grief, for it had been Robert Fairchilds promise that he would not suffer in heart for one who had longed to go into a peace for which he had...