Cavanagh, Forest Ranger: A Romance of the Mountain West

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Garland Hamlin. Cavanagh, Forest Ranger: A Romance of the Mountain West

I. THE DESERT CHARIOT

II. THE FOREST RANGER

III. LEE VIRGINIA WAGES WAR

IV. VIRGINIA TAKES ANOTHER MOTOR RIDE

V. TWO ON THE VERANDA

VI. THE VOICE FROM THE HEIGHTS

VII. THE POACHERS

VIII. THE SECOND ATTACK

IX. THE OLD SHEEP-HERDER

X. THE SMOKE OF THE BURNING

XI. SHADOWS ON THE MIST

XII. CAVANAGH’S LAST VIGIL BEGINS

XIII. CAVANAGH ASKS FOR HELP

XIV. THE PEST-HOUSE

XV. WETHERFORD PASSES ON

Отрывок из книги

From her makeshift bed in the middle of the floor Lee Virginia was awakened next morning by the passing of some one down the hall calling at each door, “Six o’clock!” She had not slept at all till after one. She was lame, heart-weary, and dismayed, but she rose and dressed herself as neatly as before. She had decided to return to Sulphur. “I cannot endure this,” she had repeated to herself a hundred times. “I will not!”

Hearing the clatter of dishes, she ventured (with desperate courage) into the dining-room, which was again filled with cowboys, coal-miners, ranchers and their tousled families, and certain nondescript town loafers of tramp-like appearance. The flies were nearly as bad as ever – but not quite, for under Mrs. Wetherford’s dragooning the waiters had made a nerveless assault upon them with newspaper bludgeons, and a few of them had been driven out into the street.

.....

She recognized one of those “knights of the lariat” sitting in the sun, flabby, grizzled, and inert. Another was trying to mount his horse with a bottle in his hand. She recalled him perfectly. He had been her girlish ideal of manly beauty. Now here he was, old and mangy with drink at forty. In a most vivid and appealing sense he measured the change in her as well as the decay of the old-time cowboy. His incoherent salutation as his eyes fell upon her was like the final blasphemous word from the rear-guard of a savage tribe, and she watched him ride away reeling limply in his saddle as one watches a carrion-laden vulture take its flight.

She perceived in the ranger the man of the new order, and with this in her mind she said: “You don’t belong here? You’re not a Western man.”

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