WAY OF THE LAWLESS

Max Brand

1921

Previous ed. published under title: Free Range




WAY OF THE LAWLESS




CHAPTER 1


Beside the rear window of the blacksmith shop Jasper Lanning held his
withered arms folded against his chest. With the dispassionate eye and
the aching heart of an artist he said to himself that his life work was
a failure. That life work was the young fellow who swung the sledge at
the forge, and truly it was a strange product for this seventy-year-old
veteran with his slant Oriental eyes and his narrow beard of white.
Andrew Lanning was not even his son, but it came about in this way that
Andrew became the life work of Jasper.

Fifteen years before, the father of Andy died, and Jasper rode out of
the mountain desert like a hawk dropping out of the pale-blue sky. He