David Dunne

A stranger by the river correctly guesses what David Dunne is carrying—and offers him half a dollar for the ice cream meant for home. David accepts, but the man’s next invitation sounds like a trick.

In Belle Kanaris Maniates’s early-twentieth-century romance, the rural Midwest is a place of neighborly kindness and hard work. Twelve-year-old David helps his ailing mother with the washing instead of going to school, and keeps his hunger and longing for an education mostly to himself. A generous serving of ice cream at the Brumble farm brings a rare moment of delight; then, on the way home, David meets a blue-eyed stranger fishing in the river. The man claims to live just around the bend, though David knows there is no house for miles. Who is this stranger, and what is waiting beyond the bend?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.