SADDLE BUM [West of the Wide Missouri] by Philip Ketchum

ONLY A FOOL WOULD RIDE INTO THE LAWLESS RHYMER RIVER VALLEY. GIL DALY WAS THAT FOOL!

Gil Daly had a thin, sun-tanned face, hair the color of straw, and troubled, gray eyes. He wasn’t exactly a saddle bum. Up to a year ago, he had been as steady as any cowhand. He'd started working for his wages at sixteen, saving his money for the ranch he eventually bought. Then the banks in far-away New York started sinking and with them cattle prices fell and credit became almost impossible for small ranchers to get. The final blow had been the drought. He lost everything.

For a year he had drifted, working for cowhand wages . . . but even a year of drifting didn’t make him a saddle bum. He’d signed on with Brewster as a cowhand, but after only a week, he was ready to leave. He didn’t like Swallowfork or the man who owned it or the men who worked here. Gil’s mind is made up when Brewster accuses a stranger of rustling, with lethal results. The decision to quit Swallowfork was his own. Then Brewster said he was fired. The decision to ride on was his own. He’d made it, then Brewster ordered him to ride on. The beating they gave him before they put him on his horse and rode him out of town was a clear message not to return, or else. But before he left Antioch he’d learned about a gold strike, which could be his way out.

Gil Daly knew he was a fool to come back to this lawless range, where every gun was against him. But if the old prospector over in the Tetons had made a gold strike, he saw a possible short-cut. Only first he had a score to settle with Dan Brewster, the most powerful rancher in the valley, and his Swallowfork riders. Brewster figured he had the law buffaloed, but the ranchers and the townsfolk of Antioch were primed to stand up to Brewster’s gunslicks. They needed a leader, someone with nothing to lose, to take Brewster down – and Gil Daly, beaten up and ridden out town, bloody and battered, sure didn't look like that man. But Brewster had lit something inside Gil Daly, and he knew he wouldn’t stop until he had paid Brewster and his gunmen back blow for blow and his hold over the Rhymer River valley was broken.

Half-unconscious, barely able to stay on his horse, Gil had almost fallen from his saddle when he was found by Myra Chenoweth and her father he was taken to their ranch. There he found in Myra a woman of rare judgment, and the questions she asked him woke a need he had never felt before to decide his own future.

Grimly he searched the shadows around the ranch house. His nerves were tight. The raw smell of trouble pulsed in the chill night air. Suddenly a gun roared out of the darkness. The bullet sped close to him and he pitched to the ground.

“I’ve winged him, Brewster!” someone yelled.

“Then move in and finish him!” Brewster shouted. Daly knew then he’d walked into a gun trap. . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Philip L. Ketchum, born 19 October, 1902, in Trinidad, Colorado, attended the University of Denver four years, spent the following decade as a social worker and teacher in Denver and Tucson, before devoting his time to free-lance fiction writing, 1938. First published 1929, his western, adventure and crime stories were featured in the top pulp magazines. With the decline of the magazine market for fiction, he became one of America’s leading western writers of paperback originals. His work was noted for the depth of characterization, strong women, and intricate plotting. Ketchum penned over 50 novels before his death in 1969.