Books: Gold Rush Huck Finn

THE TRAVELS OF JAIMIE MCPHEETERS (544 pp.)—Robert Lewis Taylor—Doubleday ($4.50).

For 2,000 miles and half a thousand pages, the Redskins keep coming. "We'll stand them off," says one embattled paleface. "If we don't, save a ball for the women and children." The reader can have himself a different kind of ball with this book—if he will only persevere. Versatile Author Taylor (Center Ring, W. C. Fields) follows in the footsteps of a master of the picaresque. Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) was a superbly comical novel, in letter form, about a family traveling around England in the days...