The Fighting Edge

She stood in the doorway, a patched and ragged Cinderella of the desert. Upon her slim, ill-poised figure the descending sun slanted a shaft of glory. It caught in a spotlight t...

The girl's eyes did not turn toward him, but the color flooded the dark cheeks. "With Father maybe. Not with me. You've got no business to talk over with me."

She sat down beside him, drawing up her feet beneath the skirt and gathering the knees between laced fingers. Moodily, she looked down at the water swirling round the rocks.

The Cinderella of Piceance Creek was scrupulously clean even though ragged and unkempt. Every Saturday night she shooed Pete Tolliver out of the house and took a bath in the tub...

Houck, an unwelcome guest, stayed at the cabin on Piceance nearly two weeks. His wooing was surely one of the strangest known. He fleered at June, taunted her, rode over the gir...

Bob Dillon distributed the food at intervals along the table which ran nearly the whole length of the canvas top. From an immense coffee pot he poured the clear brown liquid int...

Bob Dillon was peeling potatoes outside the chuck tent when he heard a whistle he recognized instantly. It was a very good imitation of a meadow-lark's joyous lilt. He answered...

Blister looked at the bride reproachfully. "L-lady, if you ain't worth s-six dollars to him you ain't worth a c-cent. But I'll show you how good a sport I am. I'll m-make you a...

At the appointed time Bob sneaked back to the hotel. He hung around the lobby for a minute or two, drifted into the saloon and gambling annex, and presently found himself hangin...

Houck's jeering laugh of triumph came back to the humiliated boy. He noticed for the first time that two or three men were watching him from the door of the saloon. Ashamed to t...

When June turned away from her husband of an hour she abandoned hope. She had been like a child lost in the forest. A gleam of light from a window had cheered her for a moment,...

Bear Cat was a cow-town, still in its frankest, most exuberant youth. Big cattle outfits had settled on the river and ran stock almost to the Utah line. Every night the saloons...

He was a big, broad-shouldered fellow, hook-nosed, with cold eyes set close. Hair and eyebrows were matted with ice and a coat of sleet covered his clothes. Judging from voice a...

"A mighty sick girl. This man here--this Houck, if that's what he calls himself--took her away from the young fellow she'd married and started up to Brown's Park with her. Someh...

"If you'd only stood up to him, Bob--if you'd shot him or fought him ... lemme go, Jake. You got no right to take me with you. Tell you I'm married.... Yes, sir, I'll love, hono...

Blister Haines found an old pair of chaps for Bob Dillon and lent him a buckskin bronco. Also, he wrote a note addressed to Harshaw, of the Slash Lazy D, and gave it to the boy.

The bunkhouse of the Slash Lazy D received Bob Dillon gravely and with chill civility. He sat on his bunk that first evening, close enough to touch a neighbor on either hand, an...

In the wake of Hawks Bob rode through the buckbrush. There was small chance for conversation, and in any case neither of them was in the mood for talk. Bob's sensitive soul did...

In the years when cattle first came to the Rio Blanco the danger from falls was greater than it is now, even if the riding had not been harder. A long thick grass often covered...

Combing Crooked Wash that afternoon Bob rode with a heavy and despondent heart. It was with him while he and Dud jogged back to the ranch in the darkness. He had failed again. A...

Blister had not overstated the case to Bob when he told him that June had been having the time of her life getting well. She had been a lonely little thing, of small importance...

The prediction made by Blister Haines that some overbearing puncher would bully Bob because of his reputation as safe game did not long wait fulfillment. A new rider joined the...

There was a game of stud after supper in the bunkhouse. Bob lay on his bed, a prey to wretched dread. He had made up his mind to have it out with Bandy, but his heart was pumpin...

White winter covered the sage hills and gave the country a bleak and desolate look. The Slash Lazy D riders wrapped up and went out over the wind-swept mesas to look after the c...

Preparations for the drive occupied several days. The cattle were rounded up and carefully worked. Many of those that had roughed through the hard winter were still weak. Some o...

Dud's observation, when he and Bob took the back trail along the river to find the missing bronco, confirmed that of Buck Hawks. He found the place where a horse had clawed its...

Into the office of Blister Haines, J. P., a young man walked. He was a berry-brown youth, in the trappings of the range-rider, a little thin and stringy, perhaps, but well-poise...

June turned away from the crowd surrounding the dead mad dog and walked into the hotel. The eyes of more than one man followed the slim, graceful figure admiringly. Much water h...

"Fellow thinkin' of startin' a drug-store. Jim Weaver is the happy dad of twins. Mad dog shot on Main Street. New stage-line for Marvine planned. Mr. Jake Houck is enjoyin' a pl...

Harshaw did not, during the first forty-eight hours after leaving Bear Cat, make contact with either the Indians or the militia. He moved warily, throwing out scouts as his part...

Harshaw's rangers caught up with the militia an hour later. The valley men were big, tanned, outdoor fellows, whereas the militia company was composed of young lads from Colorad...

The pursuers caught up with the Utes the third day out from Bear Cat. It was in the morning, shortly after they had broken camp, that Houck and Big Bill while scouting in advanc...

When the rangers and the militia stampeded after the Indian scout, Dud Hollister was examining the hoof of his mount. He swung instantly to the saddle and touched his pony with...

A moment of blank silence fell on the little group crouched among the boulders. Bob's statement that he had to go back through the fire zone--to Houck--had fallen among them lik...

Wounded though he was, Houck managed to make a good deal of trouble for the punchers before they pinned him down and took the forty-five from him. His great strength was still a...

Following the Ute War, as it came to be called, there was a period of readjustment on the Rio Blanco. The whites had driven off the horses and the stock of the Indians. Two half...

Dillon and Hollister were lounging on the bank of Elk Creek through the heat of the day. They had been chasing a jack-rabbit across the mesa for sport. Their broncos were now gr...

Bear Cat basked in the mellow warmth of Indian summer. Peace brooded over the valley, a slumberous and placid drowsiness. Outside Platt & Fortner's store big freight wagons stoo...

At exactly eleven o'clock Houck, Bandy Walker, and the big young cowpuncher who had ridden into town with them met at the corner of one of the freight wagons. Houck talked, the...

Bob and his partner did not rush out of the hotel instantly to get into the fray. They did what a score of other able-bodied men of Bear Cat were doing--went in search of adequa...

The drama of the hold-up and of the retribution that had fallen upon the bandits had moved as swiftly as though it had been rehearsed. There had been no wasted words, no delay i...

"I'm here," Houck growled. "No chance for a getaway. I ran out the back door of the bank an' ducked into the hotel. This was the first door I come to, an' I headed in."

June, watching him with eyes held in a fascination of terror, felt that at any moment he might begin pumping shots into the supine body. She shook off the palsy that held her an...

"Sho! I'll bet the hole of a doughnut he ain't been seen. If you was to ask me I'd say he was twenty-five miles from here right now, an' not lettin' no grass grow under his feet...

Houck crawled through the barbed-wire fence and looked back into the park from which he had just fled. June was kneeling beside the man he had shot. Some one was running across...

The terror in his heart rose less out of the fact itself than the circumstances which surrounded it. The gray dawn, the grim, copper-colored faces, the unknown torment waiting f...

A prince of the Kingdom of Joy rode the Piceance trail on a morning glad with the song of birds and the rippling of brooks. Knee to knee with him rode his princess, slim and str...