Prairie Flowers

Published in 1920, this Montana ranch novel picks up after Hendryx’s earlier success The Texan and brings back the cowpuncher Tex Benton. Winthrop Adams Endicott and his wife Alice, easterners who never quite shook the pull of open country, set out to buy a cattle outfit of their own and to find Tex again, who has troubles of his own and turns up in a saloon fight at Timber City. Around them Hendryx assembles bartenders, ranch hands, and a kangaroo court, mixing real danger with dry frontier humor. Cattle-country adventure runs alongside a steady thread of romance, in the plainspoken pulp-Western manner of its day. Readers who like early cowboy fiction, written before the genre hardened into formula, will find Hendryx a lively and unpretentious storyteller.