The Gold Girl

James B. Hendryx sets this 1920 Western in the rough hill country of Montana, where a young woman named Patty Sinclair arrives to make good on the legacy her prospector father left behind. Rodney Sinclair died believing he had found a rich vein of gold, and Patty rides into the unfamiliar hills determined to locate the claim he never lived to work. Alone in strange country, she crosses paths with Vil Holland, a watchful cowpuncher whose intentions she cannot read, along with a scattering of ranchers and drifters who may be after the same prize. The search becomes a test of nerve as much as of woodcraft. Hendryx pairs frontier suspense with a slow-building romance, and the result is a fair sample of the popular Western fiction that filled American magazines in the 1920s.