Crooked Trails and Straight (Classic Reprint)

William MacLeod Raine

Children's Books

Forgotten Books

A story of the Wyoming to Arizona trail; of rustlers and bandits; its secret lairs; and of Jack Lovell, who rode its full, grim, dangerous length.

Bandit Trail

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Camden

The Sheriff's Son (masterpiece C

Publisher Not Identified

Esther McLean brought the afternoon mail in to Cunningham. She put it on the desk before him and stood waiting, timidly, afraid to voice her demand for justice, yet too desperately anxious to leave with it unspoken. He leaned back in his swivel chair, his cold eyes challenging her. "Well," he barked harshly. She was a young, soft creature, very pretty in a kittenish fashion, both sensuous and helpless. It was an easy guess that unless fortune stood her friend she was a predestined victim to the world's selfish love of pleasure, and fortune, with a cynical smile, had stood aside and let her go her way. "I . . . I . . ." A wave of color flooded her face. She twisted a rag of a handkerchief into a hard wadded knot. "Spit it out," he ordered curtly. "I've got to do something . . . soon. Won't you—won't you—?" There was a wail of despair in the unfinished sentence. James Cunningham was a grim, gray pirate, as malleable as cast iron and as soft. He was a large, big-boned man, aggressive, dominant, the kind that takes the world by the throat and shakes success from it. The contour of his hook-nosed face had something rapacious written on it. "No. Not till I get good and ready. I've told you I'd look out for you if you'd keep still. Don't come whining at me. I won't have it." "But—" Already he was ripping letters open and glancing over them. Tears brimmed the brown eyes of the girl. She bit her lower lip, choked back a sob, and turned hopelessly away. Her misfortune lay at her own door. She knew that. But— The woe in her heart was that the man she had loved was leaving her to face alone a night as bleak as death. Cunningham had always led a life of intelligent selfishness. He had usually got what he wanted because he was strong enough to take it. No scrupulous nicety of means had ever deterred him. Nor ever would. He played his own hand with a cynical disregard of the rights of others. It was this that had made him what he was, a man who bulked large in the sight of the city and state. Long ago he had made up his mind that altruism was weakness. He went through his mail with a swift, trained eye. One of the letters he laid aside and glanced at a second time. It brought a grim, hard smile to his lips. A paragraph read: There's no water in your ditch and our crops are burning up. Your whole irrigation system in Dry Valley is a fake. You knew it, but we didn't. You've skinned us out of all we had, you damned bloodsucker. If you ever come up here we'll dry-gulch you, sure. The letter was signed, "One You Have Robbed." Attached to it was a clipping from a small-town paper telling of a meeting of farmers to ask the United States District Attorney for an investigation of the Dry Valley irrigation project promoted by James Cunningham. The promoter smiled. He was not afraid of the Government. He had kept strictly within the law. It was not his fault there was not enough rainfall in the watershed to irrigate the valley. But the threat to dry-gulch him was another matter. He had no fancy for being shot in the back. Some crazy fool of a settler might do just that. He decided to let an agent attend to his Dry Valley affairs hereafter. He dictated some letters, closed his desk, and went down the street toward the City Club. At a florist's he stopped and ordered a box of American Beauties to be sent to Miss Phyllis Harriman. With these he enclosed his card, a line of greeting scrawled on it. A poker game was on at the club and Cunningham sat in. He interrupted it to dine, holding his seat by leaving a pile of chips at the place. When he cashed in his winnings and went downstairs it was still early. As a card-player he was not popular. He was too keen on the main chance and he nearly always won. In spite of his loud and frequent laugh, of the effect of bluff geniality, there was no genuine humor in the man, none of the milk of human kindness. A lawyer in the reading-room rose at sight of Cunningham. "Want to see you a minute," he said.

Tangled Trails A Western Detective Story

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

William MacLeod Raine was hailed as the greatest living practitioner of the Western story, and this book presents two of his finest tales together for the first time.Two thrilling western stories set in Arizona, in which strong and silent cowboys use their wits to overcome bullies while avoiding gunplay as much as possible.The first story, ''Scalisi Claws Leather,'' is set in Arizona during the Prohibition era. The notorious Chicago gangster, Peter Scalisi, has come to the Bar BQ dude ranch to hide out for a while. He has only contempt for the hicks he encounters at the Bar BQ, but waitress Rose Dunn and top cowhand Jim Falconer show him a thing or two. Scalisi has some lessons to learn about Westerners, and he will have to learn them the hard way.In the title story, ''Long Texan,'' Boone Sibley arrives in Tough Nut, Arizona just in time to save a small child that wanders into the line of fire in a shootout. But instead of getting a hero's welcome, saving the kid puts Sibley on the wrong side of Whip Quinn and his gang, who are used to doing as they please with no one standing against them. Quinn suggest that Tucson would be a better place for Sibley. But Sibley embodies the code of the west, and says he likes the climate and the people in Tough Nut, and that's where he plans to stay. But if that's what he wants, he has to first deal with Quinn framing him for stage robbery and murder.

Long Texan: A Western Duo

Blackstone Publishing, Inc.

In his day Raine was as popular as Max Brand and Zane Grey and with them he shaped the western novel. This is the story of Steve Fraser, Texas Ranger, who tracks a murderous desperado from a mine in Texas to Lost Valley in Wyoming and along the way meets his match in the gritty but lovely Arlie Dillon. Embedded in the main story is a romance between an engineer looking for work and the determined sister of one of the desperado s victims.

A Texas Ranger (World Classics in Large Print: American Authors)

The Large Print Book Company

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Books by William MacLeod Raine