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CONTENTS

CHAPTERPAGE
Prologue [11]
I.A General Demoted [32]
II.Morgan la Fee [42]
III.A Sporting Proposition [54]
IV.Heads! I Win! [66]
V.A Marriage of Convenience [78]
VI.Where the Desert Had Been [94]
VII.Maid Marian Grown Up [103]
VIII.Getting Down to Business [112]
IX.Behind Prison Bars [123]
X.The Get-away [140]
XI.Jim Banker Hits the Trail [153]
XII.A Reminder of Old Times [162]
XIII.At Wallace’s Ranch [174]
XIV.Ready for Action [182]
XV.The Sheriff Finds a Clew [189]
XVI.In the Solitudes of the Canyon [203]
XVII.The Secret of the Lost Mine [217]
XVIII.Telltale Bullets [236]
XIX.The Finding of Sucatash [247]
XX.Louisiana! [259]
XXI.Gold Seekers [271]
XXII.Vengeance! [283]
XXIII.To the Vale of Avalon [298]

LOUISIANA LOU

PROLOGUE

The sun was westering over Ike Brandon’s ranch at Twin Forks. It was the first year of a new century when the old order was giving place to the new. Yet there was little to show the change that had already begun to take place in the old West. The desert still stretched away drearily to the south where it ended against the faint, dim line of the Esmeralda Mountains. To the north it stretched again, unpopulated and unmarked until it merged into prairie grass and again into mountains. To west and east it stretched, brown and dusty. To the south was the State of Nevada and to the north the State of Idaho. But it was all alike; bare, brown rolling plain, with naught of greenness except at the ranch where the creek watered the fields and, stretching back to the north, the thread of bushy willows and cottonwoods that lined it from its source in the mountains.

Ike Brandon was, himself, a sign of change and of new conditions, though he did not know it. A sheepman, grazing large herds of woolly pests in a country which, until recently, had been the habitat of cattlemen exclusively, he was a symbol of conquest. He remembered the petty warfare that had 12 marked the coming of his kind, a warfare that he had survived and which had ended in a sort of sullen tolerance of his presence. A few years ago he had gone armed with rifle and pistol, and his herders had been weaponed against attack. Now he strode his acres unafraid and unthreatened, and his employees carried rifle or six-shooter only for protection against prowling coyotes or “loafer” wolves. Although the cow hands of his erstwhile enemies still belted themselves with death, they no longer made war. The sheep had come to stay.