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.

Tangled Trails, A Western Detective Story (masterpiece Collection) Large Print

Raine

William MacLeod

Starling and Black Publications

Down through the Bad Lands the Little Missouri comes in long windings, white, from a distance, as a frozen river between the ash-gray hills. At its margin there are willows; on the small forelands, which flood in June when the mountain waters are released, cottonwoods grow, leaning toward the southwest like captives straining in their bonds, yearning in their way for the sun and winds of kinder latitudes. Rain comes to that land but seldom in the summer days; in winter the wind sweeps the snow into rocky cañons; buttes, with tops leveled by the drift of the old, earth-making days, break the weary repetition of hill beyond hill. But to people who dwell in a land a long time and go about the business of getting a living out of what it has to offer, its wonders are no longer notable, its hardships no longer peculiar. So it was with the people who lived in the Bad Lands at the time that we come among them on the vehicle of this tale. To them it was only an ordinary country of toil and disappointment, or of opportunity and profit, according to their station and success. To Jeremiah Lambert it seemed the land of hopelessness, the last boundary of utter defeat as he labored over the uneven road at the end of a blistering summer day, trundling his bicycle at his side. There was a suit-case strapped to the handlebar of the bicycle, and in that receptacle were the wares which this guileless peddler had come into that land to sell. He had set out from Omaha full of enthusiasm and youthful vigor, incited to the utmost degree of vending fervor by the representations of the general agent for the little instrument which had been the stepping-stone to greater things for many an ambitious young man. According to the agent, Lambert reflected, as he pushed his punctured, lop-wheeled, disordered, and dejected bicycle along; there had been none of the ambitious business climbers at hand to add his testimony to the general agent's word. Anyway, he had taken the agency, and the agent had taken his essential twenty-two dollars and turned over to him one hundred of those notable ladders to future greatness and affluence. Lambert had them there in his imitation-leather suit-case—from which the rain had taken the last deceptive gloss—minus seven which he had sold in the course of fifteen days. In those fifteen days Lambert had traveled five hundred miles, by the power of his own sturdy legs, by the grace of his bicycle, which had held up until this day without protest over the long, sandy, rocky, dismal roads, and he had lived on less than a gopher, day taken by day. Housekeepers were not pining for the combination potato-parer, apple-corer, can-opener, tack-puller, known as the "All-in-One" in any reasonable proportion.

The Duke Of Chimney Butte

Ogden, George W.

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Books by Starling and Black Publications

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Starling and Black Publications publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Tangled Trails, A Western Detective Story (masterpiece Collection) Large Print

The Duke Of Chimney Butte