Shoe-Bar Stratton

Buck Stratton comes home from the war to find that the Arizona cattle outfit he bought a week before enlisting is no longer his. A bullet wound left him with more than a year of blank memory, and while he was posted missing, the Chicago lawyer he had trusted with his deeds turned up holding a signed transfer that Buck is certain he never made. The lawyer is dead now. His daughter Mary Thorne holds the Shoe-Bar, and Buck rides out to expose her as a thief, then changes his mind and hires on as an ordinary hand instead. Keeping his name to himself, he works out who is rustling Shoe-Bar cattle and where the foreman, Tex Lynch, fits. Ames published it in 1922, and Hollywood filmed it that year as Catch My Smoke, with Tom Mix in the lead.