N UP 103
VIII. GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS 112
IX. BEHIND PRISON BARS 123
X. THE GET-AWAY 140
XI. JIM BANKER HITS THE TRAIL 153
XII. A REMINDER OF OLD TIMES 162
XIII. AT WALLACE'S RANCH 174
XIV. READY FOR ACTION 182
XV. THE SHERIFF FINDS A CLEW 189
XVI. IN THE SOLITUDES OF THE CANYON 203
XVII. THE SECRET OF THE LOST MINE 217
XVIII. TELLTALE BULLETS 236
XIX. THE FINDING OF SUCATASH 247
XX. LOUISIANA! 259
XXI. GOLD SEEKERS 271
XXII. VENGEANCE! 283
XXIII. TO THE VALE OF AVALON 298

* * * * *

LOUISIANA LOU

PROLOGUE

The sun was westering over Ike Brandon's ranch at Twin Forks. It was
the first year of a new century when the old order was giving place to
the new. Yet there was little to show the change that had already
begun to take place in the old West. The desert still stretched away
drearily to the south where it ended against the faint, dim line of
the Esmeralda Mountains. To the north it stretched again, unpopulated
and unmarked until it merged into prairie grass and again into
mountains. To west and east it stretched, brown and dusty. To the
south was the State of Nevada and to the north the State of Idaho. But
it was all alike; bare, brown rolling plain, with naught of greenness
except at the ranch where the creek watered the fields and, stretching
back to the north, the thread of bushy willows and cottonwoods that
lined it from its source in the mountains.

Ike Brandon was, himself, a sign of change and of new conditions,
though he did not know it. A sheepman, grazing large herds of woolly
pests in a country which, until recently, had been the habitat of
cattlemen exclusively, he was a symbol of conquest. He remembered the
petty warfare that had marked the coming of his