A man named Summerfield claims to hold, in a small vial, a pellet that will ignite the water of the oceans and burn the globe as a spark burns the prairie, and he means to use it as a weapon of extortion. Rhodes tells the case as a legal document, and this edition opens with an introduction placing him among the early California writers who followed Bret Harte.
An early American science-fiction tale, first printed in a San Francisco newspaper, short and still startling. Download the free EPUB.