Title:  Six Feet Four

Author:  Jackson Gregory

Release Date:  February 22, 2005 [EBook #15148]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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Sixfeet four

by Jackson Gregory

1917

TO E. M. GREGORY

“Here’s your book”

CHAPTER

       I The Storm

      II The Devil’s Own Night

     III Buck Thornton, Man’s Man

      IV The Ford

       V The Man from Poison Hole Ranch

      VI Winifred Judges a Man

     VII An Invitation to Supper

    VIII In Harte’s Cabin

      IX The Double Theft

       X In the Moonlight

      XI The Bedloe Boys

     XII Rattlesnake Pollard

    XIII The Ranch on Big Little River

     XIV In the Name of Friendship

      XV The Kid

     XVI A Guarded Conference

    XVII Suspicion

   XVIII The Dance at Deer Creek Schoolhouse

     XIX Six Feet Four!

      XX Pollard Talks “Business”

     XXI The Girl and the Game

    XXII The Yellow Envelope Again!

   XXIII Warning

    XXIV The Gentleman from New Mexico

     XXV In the Dark

    XXVI The Frame-Up

   XXVII Jimmie Squares Himself

  XXVIII The Show Down

CHAPTER I

THE STORM

All day long, from an hour before the pale dawn until now after the thick dark, the storm had raged through the mountains.  Before midday it had grown dark in the canons.  In the driving blast of the wind many a tall pine had snapped, broken at last after long valiant years of victorious buffeting with the seasons, while countless tossing branches had been riven away from the parent boles and hurled far out in all directions.  Through the narrow canons the wet wind went shrieking fearsomely, driving the slant rain like countless thin spears of glistening steel.

At the wan daybreak the sound filling the air was one of many-voiced but subdued tumult, like the faraway growling of fierce, hungry, imprisoned beasts.  As the sodden hours dragged by the noises everywhere increased steadily, so that before noon the whole of the wilderness seemed to be shouting; narrow creek beds were filled with gushing, muddy water; the trees on the mountainsides shook and snapped and creaked and hissed to the hissing of the racing wind; at intervals the thunder echoing ominously added its boom to the general uproar.  Not for a score of years and upward had such a storm visited the mountains in the vicinity of the old road house in Big Pine Flat.