Cowboys PDF EPUB

Brand Blotters

Downloads: Under 100
First published: 1912
Pages: 250

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About this book

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.

About the author

William MacLeod Raine

William MacLeod Raine (1871-1954) was born in London and taken to Arkansas at ten, where his family settled on a cattle ranch near the Texas line. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1894, worked as a school principal in Seattle, then spent years in Denver as a reporter and editorial writer for the Republican, the Post, and the Rocky Mountain News.