Out of the Blue

Out of the Blue

Out of the Blue, by Bertrand W. Sinclair, follows Rock Holloway, a young Texas range rider who sets out from Fort Worth with a trail herd bound for Montana in the era of the great cattle drives north. Before he leaves, banker "Uncle Bill" Sayre secretly hires him to keep watch over Buck Walters, the ambitious, high-living range foreman who has been given near-total control of the vast Maltese Cross cattle estate left by the late Dave Snell to his two young heirs, Alice and her younger brother. Sayre, co-executor of the estate, distrusts Walters and wants an honest, unaffiliated cowman on the ground in Montana to report on how the herd and the estate's affairs are actually being handled. En route north, Rock kills the bullying Mark Duffy in a saloon shootout at Clark's Ford after Duffy assaults a smaller cattleman, Al Kerr, whom Rock had befriended. Because Mark's brother Elmer runs the trail outfit Rock had been riding with, Rock quits rather than risk a blood feud, and drifts alone and later with other outfits toward the Marias River country in northern Montana, working variously as a trail hand, mule packer, and drover, eventually wintering with a mysterious, secretive outfit called the Steering Wheel that turns out to be illegally rebranding "doggie" cattle. Arriving at last near the Maltese Cross range, Rock stops at a ranch on the Marias belonging to Nona Parke, a fiercely independent young woman running her small TL outfit alone with her baby sister Betty after the deaths of her parents. He finds that her rider and protector, Doc Martin, has just been shot from ambush — and that Martin looks so uncannily like Rock that everyone in the country, including Martin's enemies, mistakes one for the other. Nona hires Rock as a hand, and circumstance draws him into unwittingly (then deliberately) impersonating the dead man, both to protect himself from local suspicion and to probe who wanted Martin dead and why. Piecing together gossip and behavior, Rock learns that Elmer Duffy (now foreman of the neighboring Seventy Seven, which unexpectedly settled on the Marias instead of the Judith) had a jealous grudge against Martin over Nona, but the real danger comes from Buck Walters, who is obsessively pursuing Alice Snell, one of the Maltese Cross heirs, and who has surrounded himself with hard, southern gunmen rather than ordinary cowhands. When rumors falsely brand Martin (and by extension Rock) as a cattle thief in league with a pair of local rustlers, the Burris brothers, Walters incites a mounted mob from both the Seventy Seven and Maltese Cross to lynch "Doc Martin." Rock is forced to reveal his true identity at gunpoint on Nona's porch, aided by Nona and the loyal young TL rider Charlie Shaw, narrowly averting a massacre; Alice Snell, arriving in hysterical warning, publicly denounces Walters, confirming that Martin had genuinely loved her and that Walters resented and feared him. Soon after, Walters' hired guns ambush Rock in a ravine; he kills one and captures the other, torturing a confession out of him that Walters ordered the killings and that the estate's cattle are being systematically stolen and rebranded. Freeing the surviving gunman on condition he flee the territory, Rock rides hard to Fort Benton, then to Al Kerr's flourishing Capital K ranch in the Judith Basin, and on to Billings, where he wires the full story to Uncle Bill Sayre in Texas and receives authorization to act on his own judgment. Kerr outfits him with a dozen armed riders, and Rock returns north with this makeshift posse, rejoined by Charlie Shaw, who has independently scouted out secret branding corrals hidden in a basin of the Sweet Grass Hills near the Canadian border — the place where Walters' rebranding operation, tying together the Maltese Cross theft, the Steering Wheel's mysterious Canadian herd, and Doc Martin's murder, is based. Scouting the corrals from a ridge, Rock and Charlie confirm Walters and his confederate Dave Wells caught in the act of reworking brands on stolen cattle, with armed riders posted as lookouts. A hidden sentry opens fire, wounding or downing Charlie Shaw, and the rustlers scramble to mount and flee or fight as Rock, cut off from his main body of Capital K riders, finds himself trapped on the exposed slope — setting up the climactic confrontation in which Rock's makeshift posse must storm the secret corrals to expose Walters' large-scale cattle theft, avenge Doc Martin, and secure the Snell children's inheritance, while Rock's own feelings toward the resolute Nona Parke complicate his sense of where his future on the range will lead.

By Bertrand W. Sinclair · First published 1927 · Genre: Western, Adventure, Crime/Mystery · 16 chapters

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