THE UPSTART

The author of Benjamin Blake and The Great Smith (and numerous adventure tales) with a third substantial romantic novel, this time of how one of Georgia's aristocrats get his start. Known in his mature years as Richard Price, he traces his story back to its humble beginnings, when as Dick Finger, leader of Jerry's Jollies, gang of London street urchine, he made a slim living by pocket pickings. With the death of his guardian Fiddling Fingers, he falls heir to a belief in his own gentle birth and enough of a fortune to buy himself a place in a group of strolling players -- he becomes Dick Drury, and falls in love with the leading lady, lovely Penny Price. The idyll of their love, blessed by bookeepers and their own shining youth, is ultimately wrecked on the shoals of ambition, when they fall prey to the lure of Sir Anthony Beach, who intended them no good. Set on revenge, Dick hesitates but a fraction when he discovers that Sir Anthony is his own father. But he kills him none the less, and escapes to the New World, the Oglethorpe colony, there to start anew as Richard Price, gentleman planter....Good yarn of its kind. Not up to the other two.