SIX FEET FOUR ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Beginners Projects, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
SIX FEET 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 cañons. 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 cañons 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.
Night, as though it had leaped upon the back of the storm and had ridden hitherward on the wings of the wind all impatience to defy the laws of daylight, was in truth mistress of the mountains a full hour or more before the invisible sun's allotted time of setting. In the storm-smitten, lonely building at the foot of the rocky slope, shivering as though with the cold, rocking crazily as though in startled fear at each gust, the roaring log fire in the open fireplace made an uncertain twilight and innumerable ghostlike shadows. The wind whistling down the chimney, making that eerie sound known locally as the voice of William Henry, came and went fitfully. Poke Drury, the cheerful, one-legged keeper of the road house, swung back and forth up and down on his one crutch, whistling blithely with his guest of the chimney and lighting the last of his coal oil lamps and candles.
