
In this sun‑scorched Western, three wanderers pitch their battered camp beside a wavering wheat field, each embodying a different shade of the road‑life. York, the self‑styled “blowed‑in‑the‑glass stiff,” boasts a lifetime of rail‑hopping and a sharp disdain for the “stew‑bums” he considers his peers, while his hulking companion lounges under willows with a pipe clenched between cracked teeth, a living caricature of a traveling showman. The third, a gaunt, prison‑marked figure called Cig, drifts westward to escape the heat of the East, his cold eyes hinting at a past of hard‑won crimes and a restless yearning for something beyond the desolate plains.
Together they set out across the unforgiving desert, their banter a mix of swagger and suspicion, each testing the limits of loyalty and survival. As the heat rises and the landscape stretches into endless horizon, their uneasy partnership begins to reveal hidden motives, promising a trail fraught with danger, camaraderie, and the raw grit of the American frontier.
Language
en
Duration
~7 hours (423K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Original publisher
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1923.
Credits
Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Release date
2023-11-06
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1871–1954
Best known for fast-moving Westerns, this British-born American novelist turned frontier settings into vivid, popular adventures. He wrote prolifically for decades, with stories ranging from cowboys and rangers to the Klondike.
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