The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mysterious Rider, by Zane Grey
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Title: The Mysterious Rider
Author: Zane Grey
Release Date: November 3, 2004 [EBook #13937]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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[Illustration: That round-up showed a loss of one hundred head
of stock. Belllounds received the amazing news with a roar.]
THE
MYSTERIOUS RIDER
A NOVEL
BY
ZANE GREY
AUTHOR OF
THE MAN OF THE FOREST,
THE U.P. TRAIL,
RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE,
THE DESERT OF WHEAT, ETC.
1921
ILLUSTRATIONS
That round-up showed a loss of one hundred head
of stock. Belllounds received the amazing
news with a roar .............................. _Frontispiece_
"I know why you're going. It's to see that club-footed
cowboy Moore!... Don't let me
catch you with him" ........................... _Facing p._ 98
"I'm beginnin' to feel that I couldn't let her marry
that Buster Jack," soliloquized Wade, as he
rode along the grassy trail ......................... " 164
"Jack Belllounds!" she cried. "You put the
sheriff on that trail!" ............................. " 280
THE MYSTERIOUS RIDER
CHAPTER I
A September sun, losing some of its heat if not its brilliance, was
dropping low in the west over the black Colorado range. Purple haze
began to thicken in the timbered notches. Gray foothills, round and
billowy, rolled down from the higher country. They were smooth,
sweeping, with long velvety slopes and isolated patches of aspens that
blazed in autumn gold. Splotches of red vine colored the soft gray of
sage. Old White Slides, a mountain scarred by avalanche, towered with
bleak rocky peak above the valley, sheltering it from the north.
A girl rode along the slope, with gaze on the sweep and range and color
of the mountain fastness that was her home. She followed an old trail
which led to a bluff overlooking an arm of the valley. Once it had been
a familiar lookout for her, but she had not visited the place of late.
It was associated with serious hour
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