Brand Blotters

Melissy had been up the Can del Oro for wild poppies in her runabout and had just reached the ranch. She was disposing of her flowers in ollas when Jim Budd, waiter, chambermaid...

Though Champ Lee had business in Mesa next day that would not be denied, he was singularly loath to leave the ranch. He wanted to stay close to Melissy until the denouement of t...

Melissy waited in dread expectancy to see what would happen. Of quick, warm sympathies, always ready to bear with courage her own and others' burdens, she had none of that passi...

The tenderfoot, slithering down a hillside of shale, caught at a greasewood bush and waited. The sound of a rifle shot had drifted across the ridge to him. Friend or foe, it mad...

In a very few minutes the young woman was ready. Rosario led her to the cabin in front of which she had seen the old Indian squaw. In it were seated Simon West and Black MacQuee...

She trailed the bridle reins, went up the porch steps, and drew off her gauntlets. Her hand was outstretched to open the door when her gaze fell upon a large bill tacked to the...

Since he was not of the easily discouraged kind, the deputy stayed to supper on invitation of Lee. He sat opposite the daughter of his host, and that young woman treated him wit...

Melissy saw the two prisoners brought in, though she could not tell at that distance who they were. Her watch told her that it was four-thirty. She had slept scarcely at all dur...

Mr. Diller, alias Morse, alias Bellamy, did not long remain at the Bar Double G as a rider. It developed that he had money, and, tenderfoot though he was, the man showed a shrew...

From the local eastbound a man swung to the station platform at Mesa. He was a dark, slim, little man, wiry and supple, with restless black eyes which pierced one like bullets.

It was part of his supreme audacity to trust her. While he was changing his dusty, travel-stained clothes for some that belonged to her brother she prepared a meal for him downs...

With the passing years Bellamy had become a larger figure in the community. The Monte Cristo mine had made him independently wealthy, even though he had deeded one-third of it t...

A little dust cloud was traveling up the trail toward the Bar Double G, the center of which presently defined itself as a rider moving at a road gait. He wore a Chihuahua hat an...

On the third morning Beauchamp Lee returned to Mesa--unshaven, dusty, and fagged with hard riding. He brought with him a handbill which he had picked up in the street. Melissy h...

Melissy broke her sentence sharply. There had come into her eyes a spark of excitement, simultaneous with the brain-flash which told her who had left the money. No doubt the qua...

The Mexican now had it by heart, and he pattered off the thing from beginning to end without a pause. Melissy, behind the counter, leaned her elbows on it and fastened her eyes...

Number seven was churning its way furiously through brown Arizona. The day had been hot, with a palpitating heat which shimmered over the desert waste. Defiantly the sun had gon...

Not since the start of their journey had Melissy broken silence, save to answer, in few words as possible, the questions put to her by the outlaw. Yet her silence had not been s...

As a lake ripples beneath a summer breeze, so Mesa was stirred from its usual languor by the visit of Simon West. For the little Arizona town was dreaming dreams. Its imaginatio...

Far up in the mountains, in that section where head the Roaring Fork, One Horse Creek, and the Del Oro, is a vast tract of wild, untraveled country known vaguely as the Bad Land...

"I reckon you better saddle up and take a look over the Flattops, Dunc. The way I figure it Lee's posse must be somewhere over there. Swing around toward the Elkhorns and get ba...

The voice had the soft, slow intonation of the South, and it held some quality that haunted the memory. Or so Melissy thought afterward, but that may have been because of its ow...

Flatray swung around Old Baldy through the sparse timber that edged its roots. He knew this country well; for he had run cattle here, and combed the draws and ridges on the annu...

The tenderfoot rose from the ledge upon which he had been lying and stretched himself stiffly. The chill of the long night had set him shivering. His bones ached from the pressu...

Not five minutes after Melissy had left the deputy sheriff, another rider galloped up the road. Jack, returning from his room, where he had left the box of gold locked up, waite...

The notes of Schumann's "Trauemerei" died away. Melissy glanced over her music, and presently ran lightly into Chopin's "Valse Au Petit Chien." She was, after all, only a girl;...

The story that Ferne Yarnell told them in the parlor of the hotel had its beginnings far back in the days before the great war. They had been neighbors, these three families, ha...

Rosario Chaves broke into fierce protests. Finding these unheeded, she cursed the outlaws furiously and threatened vengeance upon them. She did not want money; she wanted this m...

CHAPTER PAGE I A Crossed Trail 11 II Brand Blotting 18 III An Accusation 35 IV The Man with the Chihuahua Hat 49 V The Tenderfoot Takes up a Claim 61 VI "Hands Up" 75 VII Wateri...

CHAPTER PAGE I Kidnapped 199 II A Capture 209 III The Tables Turned 217 IV The Real Bucky and the False 231 V A Photograph 243 VI In Dead Man's Cache 255 VII "Trapped!" 266 VIII...