Produced by Suzanne Shell, Beginners Projects, Mary Meehan and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
by Jackson Gregory
1917
I The Storm
II The Devil's Own Night
III Buck Thornton, Man's Man
IV The Ford
V The Man from Poison Hole Ranch
VI Winifred Judges a Man
VII An Invitation to Supper
VIII In Harte's Cabin
IX The Double Theft
X In the Moonlight
XI The Bedloe Boys
XII Rattlesnake Pollard
XIII The Ranch on Big Little River
XIV In the Name of Friendship
XV The Kid
XVI A Guarded Conference
XVII Suspicion
XVIII The Dance at Deer Creek Schoolhouse
XIX Six Feet Four!
XX Pollard Talks "Business"
XXI The Girl and the Game
XXII The Yellow Envelope Again!
XXIII Warning
XXIV The Gentleman from New Mexico
XXV In the Dark
XXVI The Frame-Up
XXVII Jimmie Squares Himself
XXVIII The Show Down
All day long, from an hour before the pale dawn until now after thethick dark, the storm had raged through the mountains. Before midday ithad grown dark in the cañons. In the driving blast of the wind many atall pine had snapped, broken at last after long valiant years ofvictorious buffeting with the seasons, while countless tossing brancheshad been riven away from the parent boles and hurled far out in alldirections. Through the narrow cañons the wet wind went shriekingfearsomely, driving the slant rain like countless thin spears ofglistening steel.
At the wan daybreak the sound filling the air was one of many-voiced butsubdued tumult, like the faraway growling of fierce, hungry, imprisonedbeasts. As the sodden hours dragged by the noises everywhere increasedsteadily, so that before noon the whole of the wilderness seemed to beshouting; narrow creek beds were filled with gushing, muddy water; thetrees on the mountainsides shook and snapped and creaked and hissed tothe hissing of the racing wind; at intervals the thunder echoingominously added its boom to the general uproar. Not for a score ofyears and upward had such a storm visited the mountains in the vicinityof the old road house in Big Pine Flat.
Night, as though it had leaped upon the back of the storm and had riddenhitherward on the wings of the wind all impatience to defy the laws ofdaylight, was in truth mistress of the mountains a full hour or morebefore the invisible sun's allotted time of setting. In thestorm-smitten, lonely building at the foot of the rocky slope, shiveringas though with the cold, rocking crazily as though in startled fear ateach gust, the roaring log fire in the open fireplace made an uncertaintwilight and innumerable ghostlike shadows. The wind whistl