CHAPTER PAGE

I. Collars-and-Cuffs 3
II.  The Red Desert 24
III.  A Little Brother of the Cows 38
IV.  At the Rio Gloria 59
V. The Outlaws 80
VI.  Everyman’s Share 102
VII.  The Killer 122
VIII.  Benson’s Bridge-Timbers 141
IX.  Judson’s Joke 157
X. Flemister and Others 177
XI.  Nemesis 187
XII.  The Pleasurers 202
XIII.  Bitter-Sweet 224
XIV.  Blind Signals 248
XV.  Eleanor Intervenes 260
XVI.  The Shadowgraph 270
XVII.  The Dipsomaniac 289
XVIII.  At Silver Switch 305
XIX.  The Challenge 324
XX.  Storm Signals 346
XXI.  The Boss Machinist 369
XXII.  The Terror 380
XXIII.  The Crucible 398

ILLUSTRATIONS

“I’ll spend the last dollar of the fortune my father left me, if needful, in finding that man and hanging him!”
          Frontispiece facing page

His hand was on the latch of the door-yard gate when a man rose out of the gloom. 138

“Bart’s afraid he can’t duck without dying.” 176

“Well, gentlemen, I’m waiting.  Why don’t you shoot?” 400

* * * * *

The Taming of Red Butte Western

I

COLLARS-AND-CUFFS

The windows of the division head-quarters of the Pacific Southwestern at Copah look northward over bald, brown mesas, and across the Pannikin to the eroded cliffs of the Uintah Hills.  The prospect, lacking vegetation, artistic atmosphere, and color, is crude and rather harshly aggressive; and to Lidgerwood, glooming thoughtfully out upon it through the weather-worn panes scratched and bedimmed by many desert sandstorms, it was peculiarly depressing.

“No, Ford; I hate to disappoint you, but I’m not the man you are looking for,” he said, turning back to things present and in suspense, and speaking as one who would add a reason to unqualified refusal.  “I’ve been looking over the ground while you were coming on from New York.  It isn’t in me to flog the Red Butte Western into a well-behaved division of the P. S-W.”

The grave-eyed man who had borrowed Superintendent Leckhard’s pivot-chair nodded intelligence.

“That is what you have been saying, with variations, for the last half-hour.  Why?”

“Because the job asks for gifts that I don’t possess.  At the present moment the Red Butte Western is the most hopelessly demoralized three hundred miles of railroad west of the Rockies.  There is no system, no discipline, no respect for authority.  The men run the road as if it were a huge joke.  Add to these conditions the fact that the Red Desert is a country where the large-calibred revolver is——­”