At The Time Appointed

A mining expert loses his past. Can he find out who he is before it is too late?

At the Time Appointed (1903) by A. Maynard Barbour is a gripping blend of crime story, Western adventure, and romance that went through ten editions within two years of publication.

Traveling west under an assumed name, a young mining expert calling himself John Darrell witnesses a midnight train robbery high in the mountains. A young friend is stabbed to death beside him, and for one instant he glimpses the murderer's face. Struck down by fever, Darrell wakes weeks later at The Pines, the home of a blunt, kind-hearted mine owner, with no memory of who he was. He knows only the borrowed name.

Darrell builds a new life in the mining camps of the Rockies. He works as an assayer, weathers a bitter strike, and finds a mentor in John Britton, a gentle, wealthy miner whose own past hides a deep sorrow. He also falls in love with Kate Underwood, the mine owner's spirited daughter. He cannot ask her to marry a man without a name, and her father has already chosen another husband for her: his polished, secretive new business partner. When a bolt of lightning on the Great Divide restores Darrell's memory, the hidden threads of many lives begin to draw together toward a final reckoning.

Barbour, whose first novel was praised alongside the work of Anna Katharine Green, explores memory and identity, justice and revenge, and the belief that every life unfolds "at the time appointed."

This Read-Me.Org Modernized-Classic presents the complete, unabridged text with modernized American spelling and punctuation. It adds a new introduction by Colin Heston on the novel's themes, its mining-frontier setting, and its place in early crime fiction, plus review and discussion questions for classrooms and reading groups.