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The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales

Bret Harte · short story collection, 1870·11 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version11 hrs → 50 sec
  • A camp votes unanimously to raise a dying woman's orphan. A hundred rough men in a mining camp vote to keep a newborn whose mother, Cherokee Sal, dies within the hour of the birth: the resolution to adopt the infant is unanimous and enthusiastic, and an ass is enlisted as wet nurse.
  • The hat passed round holds a Bible and a diamond ring. Gamblers and thieves fill a hat with a doubloon, a diamond ring, a Bank of England note for five pounds, and a Bible whose contributor is never identified, all for a baby they name Luck after their sudden run of good fortune.
  • Kentuck can't stop retelling the moment the baby grabbed his finger. Kentuck, a hardened frontiersman, lets the infant grab his finger and cannot stop repeating the moment: he calls it rastling with it, the d-d little cuss, first with embarrassment and then, nightly, on purpose.
  • A mining camp scrubs itself clean for one infant. The camp scrubs itself clean for a baby: profanity is dropped, a rosewood cradle is packed eighty miles by mule, and Kentuck starts washing his face daily just to be allowed to hold Luck.
  • A flood ends the story with Kentuck still holding Luck. A flood on the North Fork sweeps Stumpy's cabin away in the night; the relief boat pulls Kentuck from the river still gripping the child, and his last words are that Luck is taking him with him.
  • The companion tale ends with a deuce-of-clubs epitaph. In the companion story The Outcasts of Poker Flat, gambler John Oakhurst is run out of town with two prostitutes and a drunk; he freezes to death alone in the snow beside a tree marked with the deuce of clubs reading he struck a streak of bad luck.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: Harte invented the frontier archetype of the gambler with a code and the outcast with a heart of gold in a single sitting, and the title story's flood ending refuses the sentimental rescue the setup seems to promise.

A mining camp of gamblers and outcasts adopts a dying woman's newborn as its collective redemption, then loses everything to a flood the same year its luck peaks.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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