This is kind of a goofy book. It's certainly not Grey's best. It's not one of those books you want to read a second, or even a third time, like The Light of Western Stars. For one thing, it's two romances in one. For another thing, the ending is crappy.
Buck Duane is the son of a famous outlaw, and he's inherited his father's speed with a gun. In the first chapter the innocent young Duane is called out by a dumbass cowboy named Bain. The two have a shootout in the street. Duane shoots Bain in what is clearly a case of self defense. Bain made his brag that he was going to kill Duane. Rather than hang around and make his case, he grabs a horse his Uncle Jim's prepared and lights out of town. I know it's just setup so that Duane can become a famous outlaw, but Jeez! A false accusation, or mistaken identity or something would have worked better, without much more typing!
So that's the setup. Duane falls in with the Bland gang, down on the Rio Grande, in a cattle rustling operation. Duane, being pure of heart, doesn't want to be a part of it. Bland is holding pretty young Jennie prisoner. He's using her as a scullery maid and Mrs. Bland mistreats her. He has to make love to Mrs. Bland -- which in 1915 still meant sweet-talking her, just like it did in the 1870s, when this is set. Well, by golly, Duane manages to rescue Jennie in the midst of dozens of vicious outlaws, gets himself shot through the body, and Jennie nurses him back to coherence if not health in an old hut out in the middle of nowhere. Then they ride for safety, find a friend on an isolated ranch, she again nurses him, this time all the way back to vibrant health. They ride again, amidst descriptive Zane Grey verbiage, to take Jennie someplace where she can get back to her family.
I think Grey probably wrote all this in 1912 or 1913. He got bored with it -- this is my guess, not history -- and set it aside to write something else. He needed some money or he had a contract in 1914 or 1915 and he figured "I've got a half-written manuscript.I might as well finish it." Maybe it was "I've got to come up with 100,000 words, and I've got two novelettes, so maybe I'll glue them together somehow." Regardless, he's got Duane riding hell bent for Naugahyde for the Neuces with Jennie, but then
Suddenly there came an unmistakable thump of horses' hoofs off somewhere to the fore. Then a scream rent the air. It ended abruptly. Duane leaped forward, tore his way through the thorny brake. He heard Jennie cry again—an appealing call quickly hushed. It seemed more to his right, and he plunged that way. He burst into a glade where a smoldering fire and ground covered with footprints and tracks showed that campers had lately been. Rushing across this, he broke his passage out to the open. But he was too late. His horse had disappeared. Jennie was gone. There were no riders in sight. There was no sound. There was a heavy trail of horses going north. Jennie had been carried off—probably by outlaws. Duane realized that pursuit was out of the question—that Jennie was lost.And with that bit of deathless prose he pretty much writes Jennie right out of the book. That really cheesed me off when I got to the end. Jennie was sweet, she was pretty (naturally), she was spunky once she was rescued, and she was loyal. All we get is unsubstantiated rumor that Jennie died shortly after being kidnapped. He tracks down and shoots a guy named Sellers, who kidnapped her. but no circumstances are elaborated. The poor girl could still be alive, at about the age of 120, hiding in some mesquite hut, waiting for Duane to come and rescue her, though probably not.
Duane goes into a funk, as you'd naturally expect, but since this is a novel you'd expect poor Buck to be reunited with Jennie after trials and tribulations, with his name cleared, at the end of the book. It didn't happen, even though it should have. Instead, Buck kind of goes wandering through a few adventures, never killing an innocent man, until Captain McNelly offers him a free pardon if he'll join the rangers. Thus endeth the first part of the book.
After that comes the second half, where Buck's a ranger. A bad guy named Cheseldine's running a rustling operation that's go the Big Bend country treed. The guy's a criminal mastermind, by gum. Chances are a thousand to one against Buck getting out alive, or even breaking the case. Buck ID's the bad guy through a process of pure, dumb luck. It's Colonel Whatsisname... Oh, Longstreth. Buck runs into him as he's bringing his Beautiful Daughter®, Ray, which was probably short for Raylene or something, and his niece, Ruth, to his home from his other home in Louisianna. Raylene has no idea her father's a criminal mastermind. Ruth hasn't caught on yet, either. All the answers keep plopping into Duane's lap, except for the time he's eavesdropping on a conversation between the Colonel and his ruthless henchman, Floyd, and the adobe crumbles out from under his hiding place and he has to go hide in Raylene's room, where they kinda sorta declare their love for each other and he hides in the closet.
Ray's an okay lady love, I guess. She makes a pretty good Beautiful Daughter®, though she's a bit lightly drawn. But the second part of the book is such a hurried jumble you don't really grab onto her like you did to Jennie. You don't grab onto Longstreth like you did to Bland, nor to pardner Fletcher like you did to pardner Euchre. Buck's inner torments over being a gunny start to wear. He could take the train to New Hampshire and spend the rest of his life never getting close to a gunfight. His penchant for eavesdropping also gets under the reader's skin. Finally, rather than shoot the Colonel, or arrest him and have him brought to trial and hanged as a criminal mastermind, all he has to do is give up the land and cattle he stole and go back to New Orleans or Baton Rouge or wherever he came from and has more of them. I don't know how that resurrected the guys he ordered murdered, like Laramie, who gave Buck so much of his information and who left behind a wife and five children, one of them in diapers.
And I have no idea what the hell happened to Ruth. Maybe she's with Jennie.
