Six Feet Four

Six Feet Four

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Six Feet Four, by Jackson Gregory
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Title: Six Feet Four
Author: Jackson Gregory
Release Date: February 22, 2005 [EBook #15148]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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FOUR ***

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SIX FEET FOUR
by Jackson Gregory
1917

TO E. M. GREGORY
"HERE'S YOUR BOOK"

CHAPTER
I The Storm
II The Devil's Own Night
III Buck Thornton, Man's Man
IV The Ford
V The Man from Poison Hole Ranch
VI Winifred Judges a Man
VII An Invitation to Supper
VIII In Harte's Cabin
IX The Double Theft
X In the Moonlight
XI The Bedloe Boys
XII Rattlesnake Pollard
XIII The Ranch on Big Little River
XIV In the Name of Friendship
XV The Kid
XVI A Guarded Conference
XVII Suspicion
XVIII The Dance at Deer Creek Schoolhouse

XIX Six Feet Four!
XX Pollard Talks "Business"
XXI The Girl and the Game
XXII The Yellow Envelope Again!
XXIII Warning
XXIV The Gentleman from New Mexico
XXV In the Dark
XXVI The Frame-Up
XXVII Jimmie Squares Himself
XXVIII The Show Down


CHAPTER I
THE STORM
All day long, from an hour before the pale dawn until now after the
thick dark, the storm had raged through the mountains. Before midday
it had grown dark in the cañons. In the driving blast of the wind many a
tall pine had snapped, broken at last after long valiant years of
victorious buffeting with the seasons, while countless tossing branches
had been riven away from the parent boles and hurled far out in all
directions. Through the narrow cañons the wet wind went shrieking
fearsomely, driving the slant rain like countless thin spears of
glistening steel.
At the wan daybreak the sound filling the air was one of many-voiced

but subdued tumult, like the faraway growling of fierce, hungry,
imprisoned beasts. As the sodden hours dragged by the noises
everywhere increased steadily, so that before noon the whole of the
wilderness seemed to be shouting; narrow creek beds were filled with
gushing, muddy water; the trees on the mountainsides shook and
snapped and creaked and hissed to the hissing of the racing wind; at
intervals the thunder echoing ominously added its boom to the general
uproar. Not for a score of years and upward had such a storm visited
the mountains in the vicinity of the old road house in Big Pine Flat.
Night, as though it had leaped upon the back of the storm and had
ridden hitherward on the wings of the wind all impatience to defy the
laws of daylight, was in truth mistress of the mountains a full hour or
more before the invisible sun's allotted time of setting. In the
storm-smitten, lonely building at the foot of the rocky slope, shivering
as though with the cold, rocking crazily as though in startled fear at
each gust, the roaring log fire in the open fireplace made an uncertain
twilight and innumerable ghostlike shadows. The wind whistling down
the chimney, making that eerie sound known locally as the voice of
William Henry, came and went fitfully. Poke Drury, the cheerful,
one-legged keeper of the road house, swung back and forth up and
down on his one crutch, whistling blithely with his guest of the
chimney and lighting the last of his coal oil lamps and candles.
"She's a Lu-lu bird, all right," acknowledged Poke Drury. He swung
across his long "general room" to the fireplace, balanced on his crutch
while he shifted and kicked at a fallen burning log with his one boot,
and then hooked his elbows on his mantel. His very black, smiling eyes
took cheerful stock of his guests whom the storm had brought him.
They were many, more than had ever at one time honoured the Big
Pine road house. And still others were coming.
"If Hap Smith ain't forgot how to sling a four horse team through the
dark, huh?" continued the landlord as he placed still another candle at
the south window.
In architectural design Poke Drury's road house was as simple an affair
as Poke Drury himself. There was but one story: the whole front of the

house facing the country road was devoted to the "general room." Here
was a bar, occupying the far end. Then there were two or three rude
pine tables, oil-cloth covered. The chairs were plentiful and all of the
rawhide bottom species, austere looking, but