Brand Blotters
A starving fugitive staggers out of the Arizona desert, sees a stampede kill another man, and trades papers with the corpse to bury a murder charge back in Arkansas. He turns up at the Bar Double G calling himself Morse, and the ranch is where Raine’s 1912 novel really sits: Melissy Lee, nineteen and running the place for her father, has to work out who has been blotting brands, the rustler’s trick of running a hot iron over an existing mark until the cattle answer to a different owner. She suspects the wrong man in deputy Jack Flatray, and a cattle detective in a Chihuahua hat only muddies things further. Raine is precise about range procedure and Arizona Territory detail, and he keeps things moving. The Western as it read before Hollywood fixed its shape.
