Ironheart

A thin wisp of smoke drifted up from the camp at the edge of the wash. It rose languidly, as though affected by the fact that the day was going to be a scorcher. Already, though...

The ranchman made no comment, unless it was one to say, “Get out the car.” He was a tight-lipped man of few words, sometimes grim. His manner gave an effect of quiet strength.

Among the lost legion are two kinds of men. There are those who have killed or buried so deep the divine fire of their manhood that for them there seems no chance of recovery in...

Betty Reed had watched unhappily the young tramp shuffle into the willows and disappear. She felt depressed by a complex she could not analyze. In part it was shame, for her fat...

He groped in an abyss of humiliation and self-disgust. Slacker! The cattleman’s scornful word had cut to the quick. The taste of it was bitter. For he had not always been one. I...

With an unusual depression Betty had watched the tramp move down the dusty road to the railroad track after he had declined her offer of employment. An energetic young person, s...

“We got the birds all right, Miss Betty, even if they were hittin’ the trail right lively,” he called to the girl, an ominous grin on his leathery face. “I guess they’d figured...

In the cool of the evening Justin Merrick drove down from the Sweetwater Dam to the Diamond Bar K ranch. It was characteristic of him that his runabout was up to date and in per...

All day the faint far whir of the reaper could have been heard from the house of the Diamond Bar K ranch. The last of the fields had been cut. Much of the grain had been gathere...

From Betty’s cheeks the delicate wild-rose bloom had fled. Icy fingers seemed to clutch at her heart and squeeze the blood from it. This was the worst that could happen, since s...

Tug walked to the bunkhouse beside the foreman, the latter’s fingers fastened like steel bands to his wrist. If Forbes said anything to his prisoner during the tramp through the...

While Dr. Rayburn, with Betty and Forbes to wait upon him, made preparations to dress the wound, Sheriff Daniels listened to the story of the ranchman. The officer was a hard-he...

Betty set out a breakfast for him in the dining-room and waited on him herself with the aid of Ruth, who trotted back and forth with honey, syrup, and butter for his hot cakes....

Old Jake Prowers looked grimly down upon the Flat Tops from the Notch. He could see the full stretch of the mesa and below it one end of Paradise Valley. The windmill of the Dia...

In later years the man who had called himself Tug Jones looked back on the days and nights that followed as a period of unmitigated dejection and horror. The craving for the dru...

Jones sent a messenger to his chief with word of Don Black’s threat, and Merrick at once rode to Elk Creek to consult with the man he had put in charge.

Summer had burned to autumn. The first frosts had crisped the foliage of the quaking asps and the cottonwoods to a golden glory in tune with the halcyon Indian summer. Faint thr...

Sheriff Daniels rode across the hogback above Elk Creek to a small ranch recently taken up by a homesteader, much to the annoyance of Jake Prowers. He found the man in a shed th...

The blue eyes of the little girl inspected judicially the small creatures whose tilted heads and wagging tails appealed to her. To decide which one to take was a matter of grave...

From behind the cover of a huge boulder on the steep hillside a man watched a car labor up the grade and give up. He trained field-glasses on the occupants. From his throat ther...

Merrick sat at a table in the log cabin that served him as field headquarters. A cheap lamp pinned down one corner of the map in front of him, a jar of tobacco the opposite one....

The clean bracing air of the Rockies, together with hard work and plenty of it, had poured new life into the blood of Tug Hollister. The ashen, pasty look had been replaced on h...

Tom called a warning to Hollister as the engineer and his prisoner struck out into the blinding storm. “Careful you don’t get lost. Looks like she’s gettin’ her back up for a re...

The fury of the storm rattled the window panes. Down the chimney came the shrill whistle of the gale. The light of day broke dimly through the heavy clouds that swept above the...

Through the window she saw a rider on a horse, and a moment later her brain localized him as a neighborhood boy who had recently joined the forest rangers. She went to the door,...

It is not in youth to be long cast down for the troubles of a stranger, even one who has very greatly engaged the sympathy. In spite of Betty’s anxiety about the wounded man, he...

There was not much she could do for him except bathe again his face and hands. He asked for a drink, and Betty propped him up with her arm while she held the tin cup to his lips...

Don Black had not himself built the cabin where he lived. While he was still a boy jingling his first spurs, two young Englishmen had hewn its logs out of the untouched forest o...

Betty went to sleep critical of Justin. She woke, in the dawn of a new day streaming through the window, to censure of her own conduct. Willful though the girl was, she had a ca...

The days followed each other, clear, sparkling, crisp, with mornings in which Betty’s lungs drew in a winey exhilaration of living, with evenings which shut the cabin on the slo...

To the man sitting before the fire she bloomed in that dark cabin like a poppy in the desert. She was a hundred miracles each hour to him. He saw the exquisite mystery of her pe...

It was an upsetting thing, this that had happened to Betty, as decided and far less explainable than a chemical reaction. It seemed to her as though life had suddenly begun to m...

It took her a moment to remember what it was. To her it was something done with ages ago in that pre-millennial past before they had found each other. She found no conceivable r...

It was impossible for Betty to escape the emotions that flooded her, but she was the last girl to sit down and accept defeat with folded hands. There was in her a certain vigor...

They sat on opposite sides of a table, the food and dishes not yet cleared away after their supper. A cheap kerosene lamp lit the room insufficiently. The smoke from a ragged wi...

It was nearly two weeks since Betty had shaken hands with Justin Merrick and closed in good-will a chapter of her history. She had not seen Tug Hollister since then, but word ha...

Hollister was wakened by a sound of lapping outside his tent. It was a noise feeble as the meowing of little kittens. At first he thought it must be a memory from his dream. Whe...

Betty did not know about breakfast, but aloud she quite confidently thought so. Hope was resurgent in her heart. The worst of the flood was over. Its level had already receded t...

Jake Prowers had intended, while the work of destruction was under way, to return to his ranch and let it take its course. The body of Cig would be found, and the tramp would be...

From the house Tug had brought matches with him. He gathered pine boughs and lit a fire upon the rock slab. The warmth of it went through them and restored their diminished vita...