Bat Wing Bowles

It was a fine windy morning in March and Dixie Lee, of Chula Vista, Arizona, was leaving staid New York at the gate marked "Western Limited." A slight difference with the gateke...

Three days is a short time in which to post a man on the Far West, but if you don't care what you say, and say it quick, you can give him a pretty good fill. Dixie Lee was almos...

A week passed by while Mr. Bowles prepared for his great emprise, and then one evening as the sun set behind the purple peaks of the Tortugas and lighted up the white walls of t...

If his strategic victory over Henry Lee had given Bowles, the pseudo cowboy, any swelled-up ideas about taking the Bat Wing outfit by storm, he was promptly undeceived when he w...

The cowboy's day begins early, no matter how he spends his night. It was four o'clock in the morning and Bowles was dead with sleep when suddenly the light of a lantern was thro...

It is an old saying that there is no combination or percentage known that can beat bull luck. Bowles was lucky; but he didn't know how lucky he was, never having seen a real bro...

The Bat Wing ranch, with its big white house on the hill, its whirling windmill, its tank that spread out like a lake and gleamed like liquid silver, its pole corrals, its adobe...

As the name of the Deity, to a cowboy, means little more than a word to swear by, so the holy Sabbath is forgotten as a day of rest. Not that the hard-riding puncher would not r...

The last place in the world for a humanitarian is around a cow camp, for everything there seems to savor of cruelty and blood. The only anti-cruelty-to-animals man who ever made...

The next three days were one long, aching agony for Bowles. He carried a little water for Gloomy Gus, but stubbornly refused the job of flunky. He helped the horse wrangler--a w...

It is wonderful how much a smile, or even a grin, will do for a disconsolate lover. Bowles woke suddenly to the beauties of nature and the wild joy of living; and that evening,...

"Say, where's that friend of mine--that Coney Island feller?" he inquired, addressing the recumbent forms of men as he scouted along the wagon-shed. "I'm skeered to sleep in the...

The morning after Bowles' return from his trip to Chula Vista--during which he had made the startling proposition about being misunderstood by Dixie Lee--the entire Bat Wing out...

A remarkable series of accidents happened to Bat Wing Bowles immediately after his discourtesy to the lady--accidents which seemed to indicate that he had lost his horseshoe as...

To the hard-riding cowboy of the plains, the subtleties of emotion and romance are a closed book--just as the hand that whirls the rope is too crabbed to play the violin. Some o...

"I'm sorry," said Bowles. "The reason I asked was, Brig and I are planning to make a little trip somewhere, and if I thought there was any one searching for me I'd----"

"Yes, indeed, you can!" assured Bowles, drawing nearer and smiling his naive smile. "Just don't tell anybody what you know, and let me have a chance. I've always been shut off f...

It is the philosophy of the poseurs in pessimism that for every happy moment we have in life we pay at a later date a greater price. Of course, any one who ever took a kid to th...

The upper range of the Bat Wing was a country by itself. To reach it they rode due north from Chula Vista, following an old road that had been fenced so many times that Gloomy G...

Brigham Clark's squirrel-skin story was not calculated to build up the _entente cordial_ with Texas, but Brigham was no trimmer. The only kind of fighting he knew was to stand u...

There is a madness which comes to certain people at certain times and makes them forget the whole world. In such a moment Bowles had stolen a kiss--for the first time in his lif...

When Bowles rode back to the Bat Wing Ranch he was a hard-looking citizen. His aunt, the hypothetical Mrs. Earl-Bowles, would scarcely have recognized him; Mrs. Lee started visi...

There is a regrettable but very well defined tendency in human nature which prompts the author of a miss-fire revenge to take it out on the dog. Certainly there was no more inno...

In the Homeric simplicity of the cow camps, where the primitive emotions still rule, any soul-stirring which cannot find its expression in curses is pretty sure to seek the leve...

When Bat Wing Bowles got up out of the dirt he was shaken in body and spirit. His corporeal frame felt as if it had been passed through a carpet-beater, and he had lost some of...