Westerns Books

THE PORTENT The hot weather had come suddenly, at least a month earlier than usual, and New York lay baking under a scorching sun when Miss Hetty Torrance sat in the coolest corner of the Grand Central Depot she could find. It was by her own wish she had spent the afternoon in the city unattended, for Miss Torrance was a self-reliant young woman; but it was fate and the irregularity of the little gold... more...

ISTER TERESA had wept bitterly for two days. The vanity for which she did penance whenever her madonna loveliness, consummated by the white robe and veil of her novitiate, tempted her to one of the little mirrors in the pupil's dormitory, was powerless to check the blighting flow. There had been moments when she had argued that her vanity had its rights, for had it not played its part in weaning... more...

LITTLE FISH Quirt Creek flowed sluggishly between willows which sagged none too gracefully across its deeper pools, or languished beside the rocky stretches that were bone dry from July to October, with a narrow channel in the centre where what water there was hurried along to the pools below. For a mile or more, where the land lay fairly level in a platter-like valley set in the lower hills, the mud... more...

CHAPTER I AN ARRIVAL There was no doubt that affairs were rather dull on the Bar O Ranch; at least they seemed so to "Whitey," otherwise Alan Sherwood. Since he and his pal, "Injun," had had the adventures incidental to the finding of the gold in the mountains, there had been nothing doing. So life seemed tame to Whitey, to whom so many exciting things had happened since he had come... more...

CHAPTER 1. TWO MEN AND A WOMAN "Mr. Ridgway, ma'am." The young woman who was giving the last touches to the very effective picture framed in her long looking-glass nodded almost imperceptibly. She had come to the parting of the ways, and she knew it, with a shrewd suspicion as to which she would choose. She had asked for a week to decide, and her heart-searching had told her nothing new.... more...

PRELUDE A young idealist, ætat four, was selling stars to put in the sky. She had cut them with her own scissors out of red tissue paper, so that she was able to give a guarantee. "But you'll have to get the ladder out of our bedroom to put 'em up wiv," she told purchasers honestly. The child was a wild dark creature, slim and elfish, with a queer little smile that flashed sudden as... more...

CHAPTER I A WOMAN ON THE TRAIL Many disquieting thoughts oppressed Miss Sheila Langford as she halted her pony on the crest of a slight rise and swept the desolate and slumberous world with an anxious glance. Quite the most appalling of these thoughts developed from a realization of the fact that she had lost the trail. The whole categorical array of inconveniences incidental to traveling in a new,... more...

CHAPTER ONE Casey Ryan, hunched behind the wheel of a large, dark blue touring car with a kinked front fender and the glass gone from the left headlight, slid out from the halted traffic, shied sharply away from a hysterically clanging street car, crossed the path of a huge red truck coming in from his right, missed it with two inches to spare and was halfway down the block before the traffic officer... more...

CHAPTER I IN RUDE BORDER-LAND Even in a community where unsavory reputations were the rule, Mick Kennedy's saloon was of evil repute. In a land new and wild, his establishment was the wildest, partook most of the unsubdued, unevolved character of its surroundings. There, as irresistibly as gravitation calls the falling apple, came from afar and near—mainly from afar—the malcontent, the... more...

THE GROUND-HOG The day had dawned on the summit of Apache Leap and a golden eagle, wheeling high above the crags, flashed back the fire of the sun from his wings; but in the valley below where old Pinal lay sleeping the heat had not begun. A cool wind drew down from the black mouth of Queen Creek Canyon, stirring the listless leaves of the willows, and the shadow of the great cliff fell like a soothing... more...