A Motorcycle Adventure
Summary
A lone thunderbird of steel—Dave Martin’s motorcycle—howls away from Denver’s grid, carrying a restless novice toward the violet-toothed Rockies where kin and catastrophe share the same breath. At a pine-sapped cabin, Lillian, cousin and flame-keeper, watches her father, William, vanish into bear-haunted dusk; one misstep and the mountain gulps him down a splintered mine shaft, sealing him in sepulchral dusk. The next caller is a half-breed predator who pockets William’s rifle, sniffs the air for fear, and lures the girl skyward with the lie of reunion. What follows is a cliff-edge waltz of coercion and resistance scored by wind in the spruces until the whine of a two-wheeled rescuer cleaves the silence—Dave, helmeted like a knight of chrome, vaulting ridges, trading bullets with shadows, ripping Lillian from the villain’s grip and, in a final spasm of kismet, hauling the lost patriarch back into the alpine light.
Synopsis
Dave Martin, who has lately become a motorcycle enthusiast, leaves his Denver home on his machine for a visit with his uncle and cousin who live in the Rockies. His uncle, William Martin, leaves his daughter, Lillian, at the mountain cabin, while he goes to bait his bear trap. While tramping through the woods he accidentally falls into an old abandoned mine and is unable to get out again. A half-breed, in the meantime has stopped at the cabin door, and after begging a drink of water from Lillian, he insults her. She slams the door in his face. Out of fear for her father, who he expects to return at any moment, the half-breed postpones his revenge until later. He finds the bat and gun of Martin and discovers his accident. With the knowledge that the old man is safely out of the way, he returns to the cabin and induces Lillian to go with him up into the mountains, on the explanation that she will see her father. After he has her in his possession be again attempts his assaults, but his career as a bad man is short-lived. The unexpected entrance of Dave at the cabin and his failure to find his relatives there, starts that young man upon a tour of investigation. After a most thrilling ride on his motorcycle along the sky-line drive and an exchange of bullets he manages to recover his cousin without injury to her. Soon afterward he discovers his uncle, and the little family are once more reunited.
