Salt of the Earth

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Ike Harper tells his own hard-luck tale with weary humor, while his towering partner Magpie and their burro Lodestone stumble into a frontier world where every promise of gold is probably a lie. At shabby Painted Post, a cluster of broke prospectors, led by Sad Slim Sanderson, Whispering, Forty-Dollar, and Lonesome, spend more time drinking and bluffing than mining, until two seemingly green outsiders arrive and set everyone scheming. What follows is a comic chain of salted claims, fake strikes, and gunshot-ready bravado. The men try to pass off the Golden Glow, then the Yaller Chuck, then the Web of Gold as rich ground, only to find their scams exposed by sharper eyes and bad luck. A midnight robbery attempt goes wrong, a brawl turns out to have been caused by the burros themselves, and every round of deception ends in embarrassment, bruises, or both. Full of lively dialect, tall talk, and rough frontier misadventure, this humorous Western turns greed and gullibility into a sharp, playful lesson about honesty, common sense, and the difference between true grit and mere con artistry.