The Highgrader

Jack Kilmeny is a hard-rock miner in the Colorado high country and a highgrader, one of the men who quietly pocket rich ore from the mines they work. Suspicion turns on him after two masked riders rob the treasurer of the Gunnison County fair association of three thousand dollars, and the circumstantial evidence looks damning. He holds to his innocence before Moya Dwight, an Irish girl touring the West with an English party, and she chooses to trust him against the judgment of her companions. Raine sets a fugitive’s flight and a slow-building courtship against the rough business of mining in the Gunnison country. He wrote frontier fiction with a feel for landscape and plain-dealing men, and this 1915 novel carries the mix of action, suspense, and romance that kept his Westerns in wide circulation.