CONTENTS

I[Out of the Past]
II[The Red Hand]
III[By His Own Hand]
IV[Foot-Loose]
V[The First Clue]
VI[Outside the Law]
VII[If This Be Love]
VIII[Straight Talk]
IX[Two Old Men]
X[Molly Kent]
XI[More Than a Bet]
XII[Molly Explains]
XIII[“He Is My Friend”]
XIV[For the Heart of a Girl]
XV[Madeiras Gets a Chance]
XVI[Bitter Fruit]
XVII[Gallup’s Price]
XVIII[“Kill Him, the Thief”]
XIX[“Come and Get Him”]
XX[Without Pay]
XXI[Two Dead Men]
XXII[The Face in the Window]
XXIII[The Gun Speaks]
XXIV[Johnny Dice Comes Back to Life]
XXV[Madeiras Asserts Himself]
XXVI[Between the Lines]
XXVII[Time to Act]
XXVIII[Johnny Talks at Last]
XXIX[Evidence to Convict]
XXX[Madeiras Appears at Last]
XXXI[The Death Chant]
XXXII[The Debt Is Paid]
XXXIII[Fulfillment]

SMOKE OF THE .45

CHAPTER I
OUT OF THE PAST

September had come and gone, leaving the desert brown and somber against the graying sage. The first of the cold rains had fallen. Round-up time was past. The cattle left in the hills were moving down to lower pastures. Unerringly they sensed the brief Indian summer yet to come, which would turn the grasses green for a few brief days before the cold, snow-bringing winds of late October were upon them.

There was that in the air on the range which said the year’s work was over.... The world was waiting. But in the little towns plumped down beside the shining rails of the Espee and the Western Pacific, all was activity and bustle. The steer shipping was on and the held-over wool clip was going aboard the cars. It was the harvest time of the mountain desert—the pay day of the range.

Pockets were well lined. There had been famine—days on end of hard work, of no spending. Now was the time of plenty, of satisfied appetites. Winnemucca, Golconda, Elko, Halleck, Standing Rock, in the heart of Ruby Valley—they were all alike—boisterous, turbulent, prosperous; save that Standing Rock, newer than its sister towns, was more boisterous, more continuously turbulent, and less concerned with its future prosperity.

And yet there was one who entered its hospitable gates this late afternoon who seemed untouched by its gayety. His eyes, screwed into the perpetual squint of the true desert breed, viewed Standing Rock’s activities with apparent unconcern. It was an old story to him. He knew the desert’s little ways!

His coming caused no comment. And this, despite the fact that his clothes were of an almost forgotten cut, popular in the days when Dodge City reaped its harvest from the great northward trek of the longhorns.

The Big Trek is a thing of the past; the trail itself lost, forgotten. Dodge City has long since settled down to most proper respectability. And those hard-fisted, quick-shooting men who squandered their wealth and lives, there, along the way from Santa Fe, have departed to that limbo from which none return.