With Hoops of Steel

The soft, muffling dusk settled slowly downward from the darkening blue sky and little by little smothered the weird gleam that rose from the gray-white plain. Away toward the e...

"Me, Tom Tuttle, holding up my hands while a fellow takes my gun! What will Emerson Mead say to that! Well, I reckon he wouldn't have done different, for Emerson's got good judg...

Unkempt, dusty and dirty, straggling its narrow length for a mile along the irrigating ditch, the village of Las Plumas lay sleepily quiet under the hot, white, brooding spring...

Pierre Delarue, "Frenchy" Delarue, as all Las Plumas called him, had been born and brought up in the south of France, whence he had wandered to many parts of the earth. He had m...

The next morning there were only faint traces of the excitement of the day before. Men began to cross Main street from one side to the other, at first with cautious, apprehensiv...

The jail at Las Plumas was a spreading, one-story adobe building, with a large, high-walled court at the back. This wall was also of adobe, some ten feet high and three feet thi...

Emerson Mead's ranch house was a small, white, flat-roofed adobe building, with cottonwood trees growing all about it, and the water from a spring on the hillside beyond, flowin...

The round-up was almost finished, and, so far, Emerson Mead had won the day. Backed always by his two friends, he had compelled the recognition of every general claim which had...

Fumbling in the darkness, they hurried to release and saddle the hobbled horses, and, calling to the sick cow-boy that when the foreman should come in the morning he must make h...

Emerson Mead waited until the four horsemen were within two hundred yards of him, and then he called out a good-natured "hello." The others checked their horses to a slow walk,...

After the round-up was finished Emerson Mead and his two friends started, with two _vaqueros_, to drive a band of cattle to Las Plumas for shipment. When they reached Juan Garci...

Albert Wellesly never made a new investment, nor allowed any change to be made in property in which he was interested, without first making a thorough personal inspection. For t...

The next morning after his arrest Nick Ellhorn was released on bail. He came out thoroughly sobered, and when he learned what had been the result of his drunken trick his vocabu...

Wellesly waited in silence and apparent resignation until his captors disappeared down the canyon and the last sound of the horses' feet stumbling over the boulders melted into...

Three horsemen galloped around the curve in the road that half circled the house and the corral and the stables at Emerson Mead's ranch. One of them swung his hat and shouted a...

When Thomson Tuttle and Nick Ellhorn reached the little canyon in the Oro Fino mountains they saw that the two would-be kidnappers must have been there since Wellesly's departur...

Emerson Mead heard the story which Ellhorn and Tuttle told and looked at the heap of yellow nuggets without enthusiasm. His face was gloomy and there was a sadness in his eyes t...

The four men stayed at Muletown that night and drove across the hot, dry levels of the Fernandez plain in the early morning. In the foothills of the Hermosa mountains there was...

The grand jury sat upon the Whittaker case and returned a true bill against Emerson Mead, indicting him for the murder of Will Whittaker. Mead was confined in the jail at Las Pl...

The first days of October were at hand, and the court session at which Emerson Mead was to be tried for the murder of Will Whittaker would soon open. The supreme court of the te...

On that same Saturday Marguerite Delarue received a letter from Albert Wellesly saying he would be in Las Plumas the following Tuesday, when he hoped he would hear from her own...

A bullet tore through the sleeve of Mead's coat, passing but a few inches from the head of the unconscious child. Another sang over his left shoulder, scorching his coat. His fa...

Darkness so dense lay over the Fernandez plain that not the faintest outline of the rimming mountains penetrated its blackness. Like some palpable, suffocating substance it fill...

Emerson Mead's trial had been in progress nearly two weeks, but most of the time had been exhausted in impaneling a jury. Almost the entire male population of Las Plumas had fil...

"It was Amada Garcia put me on," said Nick Ellhorn to Emerson Mead and Tom Tuttle, as the three sat in Mead's room, whither they went at once to hear Nick's story. "One morning...

The February sunshine lay warm and bright and still over Las Plumas and the sky bent low and blue and cloudless above the town. Bright feathered birds were darting through the o...