Law at Angel's Landing: A Western Story
Page 15
I looked up at the second story of the hotel and saw Garnet’s face pressed against a window. She was free, I thought. John Wallace would never beat her again.
Yager came to me, moving slowly, a shaky old man. He said, his voice trembling: “We’ll see that you get the other two men that you need, Mark.”
I turned away, sick of the whole business, and started to run toward Abbie’s house. I wanted her to know that it was over.
THE END
About the Author
Wayne D. Overholser won three Spur Award from the Western Writers of America and has a long list of fine Western titles to his credit. He was born in Pomeroy, Washington, and attended the University of Montana, University of Oregon, and the University of Southern California before becoming a public schoolteacher and principal in various Oregon communities. He began writing for Western pulp magazines in 1936 and within a couple of years was a regular contributor to Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine and Fiction House’s Lariat Story Magazine. Buckaroo’s Code (1947) was his first Western novel and remains one of his best. In the 1950s and 1960s, having retired from academic work to concentrate on writing, he would publish as many as four books a year under his own name or a pseudonym, most prominently as Joseph Wayne. The Violent Land (1954), The Lone Deputy (1957), The Bitter Night (1961), and Riders of the Sundowns (1997) are among the finest of the Overholser titles. The Sweet and Bitter Land (1950), Bunch Grass (1955), and Land of Promises (1962) are among the best Joseph Wayne titles, and Law Man (1953) is a most rewarding novel under the Lee Leighton pseudonym. Overholser’s Western novels, whatever the byline, are based on a solid knowledge of the history and customs of the 19th-Century West, particularly when set in his two favorite Western states, Oregon and Colorado. Many of his novels are first-person narratives, a technique that tends to bring an added dimension of vividness to the frontier experiences of his narrators and frequently, as in Cast a Long Shadow (1957), the female characters one encounters are among the most memorable. He wrote his numerous novels with a consistent skill and an uncommon sensitivity to the depths of human character. Almost invariably, his stories weave a spell of their own with their scenes and images of social and economic forces often in conflict and the diverse ways of life and personalities that made the American Western frontier so unique a time and place in human history.