The Fighting Shepherdess

There was Mrs. Rathburn in a wide-brimmed hat, plying her embroidery needle and looking, from afar, the picture of contentment. Equally serene, to all outward appearances, was h...

Kate stood before a teetering knobless bureau reflecting upon the singular coincidence which should place her in the same room for her second social affair in the Prouty House a...

Kate raised herself on an elbow and looked out through the open window above her bunk where the first streak of dawn was showing. The soft air was redolent of things growing and...

Momentarily flustered, flattered, and not a little curious, Mrs. Toomey opened the door one afternoon and admitted Mrs. Abram Pantin, who announced vivaciously that she had run...

Mormon Joe had underestimated Jasper Toomey's capacity for extravagance and mismanagement when he had given him five years to "go broke" in, as he had accomplished it in four mo...

Bowers lay slumbering tranquilly in the shade of the wagon, his saddle blanket beneath him and his folded arms for a pillow as he slept on his face. The herd chewed its cud drow...

Few in Prouty denied that there were forty-eight hours in the day that began about six o'clock on Saturday night and lasted until the same hour Monday morning. If there had been...

It was spring. The sagebrush had turned from gray to green and the delicate pink of the rock roses showed here and there on the hillsides. The crisp rattle of cottonwood leaves...

The experienced ear of Major Stephen Douglas Prouty told him that he was getting a hot axle. The hard dry squeak from the rear wheel of the "democrat" had but one meaning--he ha...

The moon was up when Kate got in from town, for she had not hurried. There was no one there to greet her except the sheep dog that ran out barking. She unsaddled, turned the hor...

While the improvident did, indeed, wonder what they had done with their summer wages, the thrifty contemplated their piles of wood and their winter vegetables with a strong feel...

Major Prouty hung over the hitching post in front of the post office listening with a beatific smile to the sound of the saw and the hammer that came from the Opera House going...

It was the most ambitious affair that had been attempted in Prouty--this function at the Prouty House. The printed invitations had made a deep impression; besides, wild rumors w...

A heavily laden freight wagon, piled high with ranch supplies, stood in the dooryard before a long loghouse. The yard was fenced with crooked cottonwood poles so that it served...

The long mixed train crawling into the stockyards at Omaha, with its ice-encased wheels, its fringe of icicles pendant from the eaves, and snow from the wind-swept plains of wes...

Bowers had offered to take Lingle, the Deputy Sheriff, to the sheep camp, which he was sure he could find easily from the directions Mormon Joe had given him when he hired him,...

One of the things which Mrs. Abram Pantin's worst enemy would have had to admit in her favor was that, strictly speaking, she was not a gossip, though this virtue was due as muc...

Emblazoned on the front page of the Omaha paper upon which Mr. Pantin relied to keep him abreast of the times was the announcement that both mutton and wool had touched highwate...

In the initial excitement it had seemed a simple matter to apprehend the murderer of Mormon Joe with such clues as were furnished by the axe, the rope, the shotgun and the butto...

After an absence from Prouty of several weeks, Kate stepped off the train alone one afternoon and furnished the town with the liveliest sensation of its kind that it had known s...

Kate sat on the side bench listening to Mullendore's disjointed mumblings. It was now well towards midnight and she had been sitting so for hours in the hope that he might have...

The northeast wind lifted Kate's shabby riding skirt and flapped it against her horse's flank as she sat in the saddle with field glasses to her eyes looking intently at a cover...

The prognostication made by the citizens of Prouty that it was "gettin' ready for somethin'" seemed about to be verified out on the sheep range twenty miles distant, for at five...

"Come in, Bowers." Kate looked up from the market report she was reading as her trusted lieutenant scraped his feet on the soap box which did duty as a step to the tongue of the...

The flowing sleeve of Mrs. Toomey's pink silk negligee fell away from her bare arm as she stood arranging her hair before the wide-topped dresser of Circassian walnut that looke...

It had not been possible for Prentiss to go with Kate to Prouty but he had promised to come as soon as he could arrange his affairs. This had required something like two weeks,...

Outwardly, there would seem to be no possible connection between his presence in the living room at Happy Wigwam making himself even more than ordinarily agreeable, and the conf...

With his tongue in his cheek, literally, and perspiring like a blacksmith, Teeters sat at the table in the kitchen of the Scissor Ranch house, and by the flickering light of a c...

In the little room upstairs, where less than an hour before she had dressed in happy excitement, Kate tore off the paper flowers and wild rose pods. She threw them in a heap on...

"I can't hold dem ewes and lambs on de bed-ground no more! Dey know it's time to be gettin' up to deir summer range; nobody has to tell a sheep when to move on."