The Ranchman

During the days that Parsons had passed nursing his resentment, Carrington had been busy. Despite the bruises that marked his face (which, by the way, a clever barber had disgui...

Elam recovered slowly, for Carrington had choked him into unconsciousness. Out of the blank, dark coma Parsons came, his brain reeling, his body racked with agonizing pains. His...

The train pulled out again presently, and the water-tank and the cut were rapidly left in the rear. Taylor returned to the smoking-room and resumed his seat, and while the girl...

The girl had said nothing to Parsons regarding her meeting with Taylor the previous day, nor of her intention to pass the day at the Arrow. For she feared that Parsons might mak...

Twice descending the long slope leading to the basin, Martha’s horse stumbled. The first time the negro woman lifted him to his feet by jerking sharply on the reins, but when he...

Bud Hemmingway, the tall, red-faced young puncher who had assisted Quinton Taylor in the sprained-ankle deception, saw the dawn breaking through one of the windows of the bunkho...

The _Eagle_ office adjoined the courthouse. Both were one-story frame structures, flimsy, with one thin wall between them; and to Norton’s ears as he sat with his unpleasant tho...

And Taylor was “coming.” The big black horse he was riding—which he had named “Spotted Tail” because of the white blotches that startlingly relieved his somber sable coat—was ne...

The air in the Pullman was hot and, despite the mechanical contrivances built into the coach to prevent such a contingency, the dust from the right-of-way persisted in filtering...

A month later, Taylor walked to the front door of the Arrow ranchhouse and stood on the threshold looking out over the great sweep of green-brown plain that reached eastward to...

Taylor was arrayed as Marion had mentally pictured him that day when, in the Pullman, she had associated him with ranches and ranges. Evidently he was ready to ride, for leather...

Parsons had always been an unemotional man. His own character being immune to the little twinging impulses of humanness that grow to generous and unselfish deeds, he had looked...

Elam Parsons sat all day on the wide porch of the big house nursing his resentment. He was hunched up in the chair, his shoulders were slouched forward, his chin resting on the...

Stretching out in the upholstered seat, Taylor watched the flying landscape. But his thoughts were upon the two men he had overheard talking about the girl in the diner. Taylor...

Looking back after he had been riding for some minutes, Bud saw a dozen or more horses break from the group of Arrow buildings and come racing toward him, spreading out fanwise.

Marion Harlan had responded eagerly to Carrington’s fabrication regarding the rumor of Lawrence Harlan’s presence in Dawes. Carrington’s reference to her father’s sojourn in the...

In the first place, she had liked Taylor from the very beginning—even when she had affected to ridicule him on the train coming toward Dawes. She had known all along that she ha...

A bay window projected over the sidewalk, and from a big leather chair placed almost in the center of the bay between two windows and facing a third, at the front, Carrington ha...

Elam Parsons stood on the front porch of the Arrow ranchhouse for a long time after Marion and Martha departed, watching them as they slowly negotiated the narrow trail that led...

After a time Taylor’s lips wreathed into a smile. He searched in his pockets—he had transferred all his effects from the clothing in the suitcase to his present uncomfortable ra...

Marion Harlan and her uncle, Elam Parsons, did not accompany Carrington to the Castle Hotel. By telegraph, through Danforth, Carrington had bought a house near Dawes, and shortl...

Elam Parsons awoke early in the morning following that on which Marion Harlan’s visit to the Arrow occurred. He lay for a long time smiling at the ceiling, with a feeling that s...

Before night the Arrow outfit, led by Bothwell, the range boss, came into the ranchhouse. For the news had reached them—after the manner in which all news travels in the cow-cou...

An early moon stuck a pallid rim over the crest of the big, hill-like plateau as Parsons sat on his horse in the basin, and Parsons watched it rise in its silvery splendor and b...

Neil Norton had been attending to Taylor’s affairs in Dawes during the latter’s illness, and he had ridden to the Arrow this morning to discuss with Taylor a letter he had recei...

The incident of the fight between Carrington, Danforth, Judge Littlefield, and Taylor in front of the courthouse had eloquently revealed a trait of Taylor’s character which was...

Carrington was conscious of the error his unrestrained passion had driven him to committing. Yet he had not been sincere when he had declared to Martha that he wouldn’t bother t...

Carrington was not a coward; he was not even a cautious man. And the bitter malice that filled his heart, together with riotous impulses that seethed in his brain prompted him t...

Marion Harlan did not dream of Quinton Taylor, though her last waking thought was of him, and when she opened her eyes in the morning it was to see him as he had sat in the seat...

Carrington’s experiences with Taylor had not dulled the man’s savage impulses, nor had they cooled his feverish desire for the possession of Marion Harlan. In his brain rioted t...

By the time Bud Hemmingway had finished his grotesque expression of the delight that had seized him, and had got to his knees and was grinning widely at Taylor, the horses of th...

Taylor’s last shot, when he had been automatically pressing the trigger after Carrington had struck him viciously with his fist, had brought down the last of the three men who h...

One thought dominated Marion Harlan’s brain as she packed her belongings into the little handbag in her room at the Arrow—an overpowering, monstrous, hideous conviction that she...

Hemmingway tentatively suggested that a ride through the gorge toward the Kelso Basin might simplify matters for himself and Taylor; it might, he said, even seem to make the def...

James J. Carrington was unscrupulous, but even his most devout enemy could not have said that he lacked vision and thoroughness. And, while he had been listening to Danforth in...