The classic Western, now newly repackaged as part of Bantam's Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures program--with never-before-seen material from Louis and his son, Beau L'Amour. It was just a godforsaken mountainside, but no place on earth was richer in silver. For a bustling, enterprising America, this was the great bonanza. The dreamers, the restless, the builders, the vultures--they were lured by the glittering promise of instant riches and survived the brutal hardships of a mining camp to raise a legendary boom town. But some sought more than wealth. Val Trevallion, a loner haunted by a violent past. Grita Redaway, a radiantly beautiful actress driven by an unfulfilled need. Two fiercely independent spirits, together they rose above the challenges of the Comstock to stake a bold claim on the future. Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a project created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives.   In  Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1  and  Volume 2,  Beau L’Amour takes the reader on a guided tour through many of the finished and unfinished short stories, novels, and treatments that his father was never able to publish during his lifetime. L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel,  No Traveller Returns,  faithfully completed for this program, is a voyage into danger and violence on the high seas.   Additionally, many beloved classics will be rereleased with an exclusive Lost Treasures postscript featuring previously unpublished material, including outlines, plot notes, and alternate drafts. These postscripts tell the story behind the stories that millions of readers have come to know and cherish. Our foremost storyteller of the American West,  Louis L’Amour  has thrilled a nation by chronicling the adventures of the brave men and woman who settled the frontier. There are more than three hundred million copies of his books in print around the world. Chapter 1 It began with a dream that ended in horror. It began in a thatched cottage with wind around it and rain beating on the shutters, with a flagstone floor and the smell of fish frying, and his mother putting blue plates on the table and his father sitting by the fire. It began in Cornwall, in England, in 1849. It began with listening to the storm blowing in from the sea and the fire hissing from occasional drops that fell down the chimney. It began with Val Trevallion’s father saying, “Mary, we are going to America.” His mother stopped, holding a blue plate in her two hands, staring at his father. “We are going to California, to the goldfields. There will be no more mines for our son, and this day I have decided.” Tom Trevallion leaned over and knocked his pipe empty of ash on the edge of the hearth. “Tomorrow we will go to Gunwalloe.” “But aren’t there mines in the goldfields?” “It is placer-­mining like we tinners used to do before the deep mines began. A man need not go underground there, nor a lad, either. “Look at him! He has been a year in the mines now and the color is gone from him. He was a fine lad with a fine brown color to him when he worked with the fishing. I’ll not have it, Mary. He shall not live hidden from the sun as I have.” “But how can we, Tom?” “I’ve put by a little . . . not enough, but something. And we shall go to Gunwalloe by the sea for a few days.” “To Gunwalloe? Oh!” She realized her husband was speaking of the treasure. “But it is useless. So many have tried, and some of them for years.” “Aye. Yet I have been told a thing or two. I have spent days and nights with old Tregor. The man’s dying now and well he knows it. He’s always liked me, Mary—­” “Your grandfather was shipmates with him. They went through it together, those two.” “He’s whispered a thing to me, the old man has, and nothing about the money-­ship, she from whom the coins wash ashore from time to time. ’Tis another vessel entirely, their own vessel. When she was sinking off the Lizard some of the men escaped overside, each with his own keeping, the share each man had for himself. They tried to run up the coast to Gunwalloe where they had friends, but it was a bloody beast of a gale, and they went on the rocks off there, and only grandfather and old Tregor reached the shore. “Most of what they had, and those with them, still lies yonder, off the rocks. No great treasure, mind you, but enough for California, I’m thinking.” “But if you start diving off the rocks you’ll have half the village around you!” “At night, Mary, only at night. On the last days of fishing . . . ’twas then I found the wreck. “We’ve but one son, Mary, and he must have his chance. In the old days of tinners it was not a bad thing, working along the streams and such. We were out in the air and working for ourselves only. Now it is the big companies who have it all, and they do not like me, Mary. We tinners were a different breed, too free to suit them. “It’s for America we are, a bit of land and a cow, some chickens for eggs, and a horse or