Pappy's Gold

The year is 1898. Almost half a century has passed since your grandfather left for California to join the "Great Gold Rush."

Although you never met him, those who knew him say that "Pappy" had maintained regular contact with the home folks. Reports were "real promisin' " until one day the letters just stopped. Pappy wasn't heard from again. However, something caught your eye while reading through some of the old letters Pappy had written to your grandmother, Sara.

It seems that all the letters ended with the postscript, "Sara, your mine." Your kinfolk have generally accepted that this was just a word of endearment to Sara. Since Pappy wasn't an educated person, the misspelling of "you're" didn't seem odd. Until now.

After a bit of investigating, you find yourself in a California desert near what the local persons call "Sara Mine." The object of this Adventure is find out what happened to your grandfather and to uncover the gold. As with most Adventures, two-word commands are accepted. There's quite an extensive vocabulary, so feel free to experiment.

Since the mine has been deserted for years, it harbors many dangers. It would be wise to SAVE your game to tape or disk from time to time. There is no help command but you will benefit from a clue at various locations. If you want to stop, just type QUIT. To move from place to place, type the first letter of the direction in which you wish to go. INVEntory will let you know what you are carrying and SCORE reveals the number of moves you have made. The up-arrow key

may be used to restore the screen if the CLEAR or BREAK key is hit accidentally. (If you hit the BREAK key, enter CONT and press the up-arrow key.)

Before running the program, you should enter a PCLEARl to reserve memory. If you should forget, just reenter RUN and the program will operate. If you have l 6K with disk, you should enter POKE25,14: NEW before loading the game. For those who are interested in programming techniques, the verbs and nouns are contained in single strings and then extracted using the INSTR command.

There's gold in them hills!