The Golden Spider

The Golden Spider by Francis Lynde

The Golden Spider follows three college freshmen—Dick Maxwell, Larry Donovan, and Charles "Purdick" Purdick—who set off from Brewster on a summer prospecting expedition into Colorado's Little Hophra Mountains, financed by Dick's uncle, mining man William "Uncle Billy" Starbuck. Their official mission is to locate deposits of industrial metals like tungsten, vanadium, and molybdenum, but Starbuck sends them off with a tantalizing legend: years earlier, a dying prospector named James Brock told him of a fabulously rich gold vein he'd discovered and named "The Golden Spider," after a web-shrouded crevice where sunlight made a spider's body glint like gold. Brock willed his claim to Starbuck, who never found it and now half-jokingly passes the quest to the boys, along with Brock's crude pencil-sketch map. Unbeknownst to them, a crippled eavesdropper overhears the tale in Starbuck's office and, with two accomplices, tails the boys from the trailhead. That night, alert little Purdick catches the cripple rifling their camp and stealing their rifles; the trio narrowly escapes over the treacherous, thawing Mule-Ear Pass on foot and burro, evading the outlaws' horses (one of which plunges to its apparent doom on the icy trail). In the scramble, Purdick loses the party's only mineralogy reference book and Brock's map, forcing him and Larry to backtrack through the outlaws' vicinity to retrieve the book while Dick pushes on with the burros. Dick becomes separated and lost, stumbling upon a kindly hermit prospector, "Daddy Longbeard," who has spent years grinding out a nearly worthless silver seam. Dick's rudimentary blowpipe assaying reveals the hermit's "worthless" fault-filling is actually rich telluride ore—making the old man wealthy overnight. In gratitude, the hermit—revealed as a former partner of Brock's—gives Dick a second, more specific old map narrowing the search area for the Golden Spider. Reunited, the boys spend weeks methodically prospecting, discovering and legally staking claims to genuine tungsten and vanadium deposits, applying blowpipe chemistry and mineralogical tests learned from their textbook. Their pursuers periodically resurface: a bear ransacks and loots their camp of food, blankets, and weapons during an unguarded absence (the missing rifles later traced to a Natrolia storekeeper who unwittingly bought them from the outlaw trio); a flash flood nearly drowns them in a canyon; and a near-catastrophic three-day trek without adequate food tests Purdick's stamina and grit to the breaking point, though he refuses to be coddled or left behind. Eventually the boys discover a mysterious ice-choked cave in a ravine, explored partly out of curiosity. A collapsed passage forces them to dynamite through a blocked tunnel—and the blast breaks them through into a naturally formed tunnel mouth facing the rising sun, where a spider's web glows gold in the morning light, exactly as Brock described. Weathered lettering on the rock confirms it: this is the long-lost Golden Spider lode, complete with Brock's original, expired discovery notice and abandoned tools. The vein assays rich in free gold. Their triumph is immediately complicated: they spot the campfire smoke of their old adversaries camped nearby in the same gulch, apparently drawn by having overheard the boys testing a stray piece of the ore. With their week's timetable for returning to college looming, the boys must decide whether to quietly stake a re-location notice and slip away hoping to draw the claim-jumpers off the scent, or stay and risk an armed confrontation to legally complete the required discovery work and secure ownership before the villains can seize the bonanza for themselves—setting up the novel's climactic struggle over the mine's rightful possession.

By Francis Lynde · First published 1923 · Genre: Adventure, Coming-of-Age, Action/Thriller · 12 chapters · 71,806 words

First lines

There wasn't much suggestion of a canyon, lost or found, in the handsomely furnished office in the Brewster National Bank building where three young fellows in flannel shirts, belted corduroys and hob-nailed lace boots were waiting for the owner of the office to make his appearance.

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The Golden Spider is listed on Textopian as a novel by Francis Lynde, dated 1923 CE.

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mystery · adventure · historical fiction · thriller · suspense · intrigue · treasure hunt · espionage · conspiracy · quest · danger · drama

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