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The Master of Ballantrae: Indian

This brings me to that morning in April, 1764, that The Master returned to us again, this time with an Indian servant. With his return my lord and lady, I urging them on, took ship for New York, where my lady had property through her father. This voyage, so I thought, will at one stroke rid them of The Master and weave them closer together.

Twenty days it took The Master to learn where they had gone; whereupon he also sailed for New York, and I on the same ship, praying that she would go down, even with myself with her, if it would but take The Master also. I looked forward with woe to the day he should set foot in New York; but our ship was a slow sailer, and other ships which sailed later arrived before us; so it happened that my lord had word of The Master's coming and prepared for him. There was suspicion of more than one murder, it seems, to The Master's hand during the earlier stay he made in America, and so now he found it a better business to leave New York and hunt in the wilderness for that treasure which he had buried so many years before.

At this time all the evil The Master had done seemed borne in a flood upon my lord's brain. He became moody and took to drink. There had been talk that he connived with the crew which The Master had hired for his expedition into the wilderness, bribing the leaders to make way with his brother. There is no evidence of that, but it is true that The Master's Indian servant, to save his life, as he said, did bury him alive, with the intent to resurrect and restore him later by the agency of some secret Oriental trick. My lord and a party, I being of it, followed The Master, and it was when the East Indian was lifting his body from the grave that we came upon them. I thought for a moment that the eyelids fluttered. Others say that the lips strove to speak, that his teeth showed through his beard, which may have been, as I was busy elsewhere, for at the first disclosure of the dead man's eyes my lord had fallen to the ground. When I raised him he was a corpse. I buried him there; my lady laid an equal stone to each; and there where they died, side by side, they lie to this day.

COOPER AT the age of seventeen, James Fenimore Cooper determined to enter upon a naval career in the service of his country. His apprenticeship was begun on a freighter sailing from New York to Cowes. On a stormy passage of forty days, he endured the vigorous hardships of life before the mast. This was followed by an even rougher period of fifty-two days. These adventures furnished vivid material for thrilling episodes in his sea novels.

After this he served in the navy in various capacities, storing up invaluable experience to be relived by thousands in the pages of his books. At the age of twenty-one he married. This fiery, irritable, and strong -willed man was easily influenced throughout his life by his wife, to whom he was deeply devoted. Through her he abandoned his ambition for a naval career. Not until he was thirty, however, did he begin to write. His first novel was dull beyond belief. Nevertheless, his friends urged him to try again. This time he laid the scene in his own land and wrote of patriotism, the passion of his own heart. "The Spy" appeared in 1821 and was soon so popular as to make the largest sales yet won by an American writer.

Cooper had written his first novel to prove that he could invent a more interesting tale than one he had just read. He likewise wrote his first sea story to rival Scott's "The Pirate," and to prove that the author of a sea novel should have lived on shipboard in order to know not only the ocean, but the intimate ways and workings of ships. "The Pilot" was convincing. It met with instantaneous and brilliant success in Europe and America.