Illustrations
| PAGE | |
| Instinctively each knew the other for a foe. | [Frontispiece] |
| “You are going to marry me—some day. That’s what I think of you!” | [97] |
| “You men are blind. Corrigan is a crook who will stop at nothing.” | [283] |
“Firebrand” Trevison
CHAPTER I
THE RIDER OF THE BLACK HORSE
The trail from the Diamond K broke around the base of a low hill dotted thickly with scraggly oak and fir, then stretched away, straight and almost level (except for a deep cut where the railroad gang and a steam shovel were eating into a hundred-foot hill) to Manti. A month before, there had been no Manti, and six months before that there had been no railroad. The railroad and the town had followed in the wake of a party of khaki-clad men that had made reasonably fast progress through the country, leaving a trail of wooden stakes and little stone monuments behind. Previously, an agent of the railroad company had bartered through, securing a right-of-way. The fruit of the efforts of these men was a dark gash on a sun-scorched level, and two lines of steel laid as straight as skilled eye and transit could make them—and Manti.