Upon the morning of the fourth day following Haydon's visit to the Rancho Seco, a dust cloud developed on the northwestern horizon. Harlan observed the cloud; he had been watching...
The several days following Dave's unexpected call at Las Palmas Alaire spent in a delightful reverie. She had so often wrestled with the question of divorce that she had begun to w...
When Wade first opened his eyes, after he had been stricken senseless, he was first conscious of his throbbing head, and on seeking the reason of the pain, was amazed to find his f...
Black MacQueen rolled a cigarette and sauntered toward the other outlaw. "I reckon you better saddle up and take a look over the Flattops, Dunc. The way I figure it Lee's posse mus...
Vaguely, as of a sound coming from far distances, the crack of a revolver-shot penetrated to the girl's numbed brain. It did not surprise her. Indeed, it roused only a feeling of t...
"Well, yuh'd better get ready to take yore medicine," sneered the outlaw, his voice shaking with rage. "I'm goin' to make yuh crawl on yore hands and knees, Cotton-picker!" He hols...
Uncle Jepson and Aunt Martha had not seen Masten when he had visited Ruth, for they had gone in the buckboard to Red Rock. And Masten had departed when they reached home. Nor did t...
The Lazy-Y ranch-house, a one-storied building of logs, was built about three sides of a paved court. In the middle of this court stood a well with a high rustic top, and about thi...
In the half light of the early morning, a stagecoach was rattling down a steep hill near the New Mexico-Arizona boundary line. The team of six bronchos fought against the weight of...
They knew what it meant; even Joan had heard the cry of the lone wolf hunting in the lean time of winter, and of all things sad, all things lonely, all things demoniacal, the howl...
I. "Huh! Get on to the glad rags!" Shorty surveyed his partner with simulated disapproval, and Smoke, vainly attempting to rub the wrinkles out of the pair of trousers he had just...
During the weeks that followed Meade Burrell saw much of Necia. At first he had leaned on the excuse that he wanted to study the curious freak of heredity she presented; but that w...
In gala spirits we broke camp the next morning. The herd had left the bed-ground at dawn, and as the outfit rode away to relieve the last guard, every mother's son was singing. The...
Houck's jeering laugh of triumph came back to the humiliated boy. He noticed for the first time that two or three men were watching him from the door of the saloon. Ashamed to the...
We all remembered very distinctly Bulger's advent in Rattlesnake Camp. It was during the rainy season--a season singularly inducive to settled reflective impressions as we sat and...
The same dawn unrolled before the eyes of a man and a girl, riding southward along the ragged margin of the T-T ranch. Westward stretched the wide, rolling range-land, empty at the...
At the mouth of the coulee, she turned to the left instead of to the right, and so galloped directly away from the Bar Nothing ranch, down the narrow valley known locally as the Fl...
SOON the shepherds were left to a quiet unbroken by the whistle of wild mustangs, the whoop of hunters, the ring of iron-shod hoofs on the stones. The scream of an eagle, the bleat...
A grimy buck with no hat of any sort and with his hair straggling unbraided over one side of his face to conceal a tumor which grew just over his left eye like a large, ripe plum,...
Noting the concerted movement toward him, Harlan grinned at Barbara, gently disengaged himself from her grasp, and urged her toward the door of the sheriff's office. She made no ob...
"I wish," said Phoebe, putting her two hands on Miss Georgie's shoulders at the gate and looking up at her with haggard eyes, "you'd see what you can do with Vadnie. The poor child...
Madeline bolted the door, and, flying into the kitchen, she told the scared servants to shut themselves in. Then she ran to her own rooms. It was only a matter of a few moments for...
The train that carried Corrigan's letter eastward bore, among its few other passengers, a young man with a jaw set like a steel trap, who leaned forward in his seat, gripping the b...
The still loneliness of desertion held fast the clutter of sheds and old stables roofed with dirt and rotting hay. The melancholy of emptiness hung like an invisible curtain before...
Just why that young Irishman should have been so balefully branded was more than the first lieutenant of the troop could understand. To be sure, the lieutenant's opportunities for...
It is a penitentiary offense for anyone to set fire to prairie grass or timber; and if you know the havoc which one blazing match may work upon dry grassland when the wind is blowi...
Unheeding the drama that was rapidly and invisibly (except for the incident of Braman and the window) working itself out in its midst, Manti lunged forward on the path of progress,...
Under Providence, a man may achieve the making of many things--ships, books, fortunes, himself even, quite often enough to encourage others; but let him beware of creating a town....
The Old Man sat out in his big chair on the porch, smoking and staring dully at the trail which led up the bluff by way of the Hog's Back to the benchland beyond. Facing him in an...
He was the evolution of a military horse-trade,--one of those periodical swappings required of his dragoons by Uncle Sam on those rare occasions when a regiment that has been dry-r...