The Flaming Jewel

Three parties want the same stone, and none of them has a clean claim to it. The gem was taken from the Grand Duchess Theodorica of Esthonia by the international thief José Quintana, and taken from Quintana in Paris during the war by an American soldier, Mike Clinch, who now keeps a disreputable hotel at Star Pond in the Adirondacks. Clinch is a smuggler and worse, but his one straight motive is his stepdaughter, Eve Strayer, whose future he means to buy with the jewel. Quintana comes to the North Woods to get it back, his gang behind him, while State Trooper Stormont and James Darragh, who works Clinch’s place under the name Hal Smith, close in from other directions. Chambers wrote this in 1922, and he knew the country: the manhunt runs hard through dark timber.