'Firebrand' Trevison   By: Charles Alden Seltzer (1875-1942)

"FIREBRAND" TREVISON

BY CHARLES ALDEN SELTZER

AUTHOR OF THE VENGENCE OF JEFFERSON GAWNE, THE BOSS OF THE LAZY Y, THE RANGE BOSS, Etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY P. V. E. IVORY

GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Made in the United States of America

Copyright A. C. McClurg & Co. 1918

Published September, 1918

Copyrighted in Great Britain

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE I The Rider of the Black Horse 1 II In Which Hatred is Born 10 III Beating a Good Man 30 IV The Long Arm of Power 42 V A Telegram and a Girl 53 VI A Judicial Puppet 71 VII Two Letters Go East 79 VIII The Chaos of Creation 82 IX Straight Talk 93 X The Spirit of Manti 100 XI For the "Kiddies" 109 XII Exposed to the Sunlight 113 XIII Another Letter 130 XIV A Rumble Of War 137 XV A Mutual Benefit Association 146 XVI Wherein A Woman Lies 151 XVII Justice Vs. Law 155 XVIII Law Invoked and Defied 169 XIX A Woman Rides in Vain 183 XX And Rides Again in Vain 192 XXI Another Woman Rides 209 XXII A Man Errs and Pays 221 XXIII First Principles 234 XXIV Another Woman Lies 253 XXV In the Dark 264 XXVI The Ashes 273 XXVII The Fight 290 XXVIII The Dregs 310 XXIX The Calm 321

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Instinctively each knew the other for a foe. Frontispiece

"You are going to marry me some day. That's what I think of you!" 97

"You men are blind. Corrigan is a crook who will stop at nothing." 283

"FIREBRAND" TREVISON

CHAPTER I

THE RIDER OF THE BLACK HORSE

The trail from the Diamond K broke around the base of a low hill dotted thickly with scraggly oak and fir, then stretched away, straight and almost level (except for a deep cut where the railroad gang and a steam shovel were eating into a hundred foot hill) to Manti. A month before, there had been no Manti, and six months before that there had been no railroad. The railroad and the town had followed in the wake of a party of khaki clad men that had made reasonably fast progress through the country, leaving a trail of wooden stakes and little stone monuments behind. Previously, an agent of the railroad company had bartered through, securing a right of way. The fruit of the efforts of these men was a dark gash on a sun scorched level, and two lines of steel laid as straight as skilled eye and transit could make them and Manti.

Manti could not be overlooked, for the town obtruded upon the vision from where "Brand" Trevison was jogging along the Diamond K trail astride his big black horse, Nigger. Manti dominated the landscape, not because it was big and imposing, but because it was new. Manti's buildings were scattered there had been no need for crowding; but from a distance from Trevison's distance, for instance, which was a matter of three miles or so Manti looked insignificant, toy like, in comparison with the vast world on whose bosom it sat. Manti seemed futile, ridiculous. But Trevison knew that the coming of the railroad marked an epoch, that the two thin, thread like lines of steel were the tentacles of the man made monster that had gripped the East business reaching out for newer fields and that Manti, futile and ridiculous as it seemed, was an outpost fortified by unlimited resource. Manti had come to stay.