The Lone Star Ranger

By Zane Grey

When he is forced to kill a man after a deadly attack, Buck Duane begins a life on the run while trying to clear his name, and his fortunes are changed by a beautiful woman and a Texas Ranger who offers to pardon him for a price.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781716162831

Zane Grey

American author (Pearl Zane Grey) is best known as a pioneer of the Western literary genre, which idealized the Western frontier and the men and women who settled the region. Following in his father’s footsteps, Grey studied dentistry while on a baseball scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. Grey’s athletic talent led to a short career in the American minor league before he established his dentistry practice. As an outlet to the tedium of dentistry, Grey turned to writing, and finally abandoned his dental practice to write full time. Over the course of his career Grey penned more than ninety books, including the best-selling Riders of the Purple Sage. Many of Grey’s novels were adapted for film and television. He died in 1939.

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Table of Contents

Title

About Author

About Book

Part 1 - The Outlaw

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Part 2 - The Ranger

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

The Lone Star Ranger

Zane Grey

Published: 1915

Categorie(s): Fiction, Westerns

About Grey:

Pearl Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939) was an American author and dentist best known for his popular adventure novels and stories associated with the Western genre in literature and the arts; he idealized the American frontier. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was his best-selling book.

In addition to the commercial success of his printed works, his books have had second lives and continuing influence when adapted as films and television productions. His novels and short stories have been adapted into 112 films, two television episodes, and a television series, Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater.

Biography

Early life

Pearl Zane Grey was born January 31, 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio. His birth name may have originated from newspaper descriptions of Queen Victoria's mourning clothes as pearl grey. He was the fourth of five children born to Alice Allie Josephine Zane, whose English Quaker immigrant ancestor Robert Zane came to the North American colonies in 1673, and her husband, Lewis M. Gray, a dentist. His family changed the spelling of its last name to Grey after his birth. Later Grey dropped Pearl and used Zane as his first name.

He grew up in Zanesville, a city founded by his maternal grandfather, John McIntire, who had been gifted the land by Zane's maternal great-grandfather Ebenezer Zane, an American Revolutionary War patriot.

Both Zane and his brother Romer were active, athletic boys who were enthusiastic baseball players and fishermen. From an early age, he was intrigued by history. Soon, he developed an interest in writing. His early interests contributed to his later writing success. For example, his knowledge of history informed his first three novels, which recounted the heroism of ancestors who fought in the American Revolutionary War.

As a child, Grey frequently engaged in violent brawls, probably related to his father’s punishing him with severe beatings. Though irascible and antisocial like his father, Grey was supported by a loving mother and found a father substitute. Muddy Miser was an old man who approved of Grey's love of fishing and writing, and who talked about the advantages of an unconventional life. Despite warnings by Grey's father to steer clear of Miser, the boy spent much time during five formative years in the company of the old man.

Grey was an avid reader of adventure stories such as Robinson Crusoe and the Leatherstocking Tales, as well as dime novels featuring Buffalo Bill and Deadwood Dick. He was enthralled by and crudely copied the great illustrators Howard Pyle and Frederic Remington. He was particularly impressed with Our Western Border, a history of the Ohio frontier that likely inspired his earliest novels. Zane wrote his first story, Jim of the Cave, when he was fifteen. His father tore it to shreds and beat him.

Due to shame from a severe financial setback in 1889 caused by a poor investment, Lewis Grey moved his family from Zanesville and started again in Columbus, Ohio. While his father struggled to re-establish his dental practice, Zane Grey made rural house calls and performed basic extractions, which his father had taught him. The younger Grey practiced until the state board intervened. His brother Romer earned money by driving a delivery wagon. Grey also worked as a part-time usher in a theater and played summer baseball for the Columbus Capitols, with aspirations of becoming a major leaguer. Eventually, Grey was spotted by a baseball scout and received offers from many colleges. Romer also attracted scouts’ attention and went on to have a professional baseball career.

University of Pennsylvania and baseball

Grey chose the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship, where he studied dentistry and joined Sigma Nu fraternity; he graduated in 1896. When he arrived at Penn, he had to prove himself worthy of a scholarship before receiving it. He rose to the occasion by coming in to pitch against the Riverton club, pitching five scoreless innings and producing a double in the tenth which contributed to the win. The Ivy League was highly competitive and an excellent training ground for future pro baseball players. Grey was a solid hitter and an excellent pitcher who relied on a sharply dropping curve ball. When the distance from the pitcher's mound to the plate was lengthened by ten feet in 1894 (primarily to reduce the dominance of Cy Young's pitching), the effectiveness of Grey's pitching suffered. He was re-positioned to the outfield. The short, wiry baseball player remained a campus hero on the strength of his timely hitting.

Zane Grey at the University of Pennsylvania, 1895

He was an indifferent scholar, barely achieving a minimum average. Outside class he spent his time on baseball, swimming, and creative writing, especially poetry. His shy nature and his teetotaling set him apart from other students, and he socialized little. Grey struggled with the idea of becoming a writer or baseball player for his career, but unhappily concluded that dentistry was the practical choice.

During a summer break, while playing summer nines in Delphos, Ohio, Grey was charged with, and quietly settled, a paternity suit. His father paid the $133.40 cost and Grey resumed playing summer baseball. He concealed the episode when he returned to Penn.

Grey went on to play minor league baseball with several teams, including the Newark, New Jersey Colts in 1898 and also with the Orange Athletic Club for several years. His brother Romer Carl Reddy Grey (known as R.C. to his family) did better and played professionally in the minor leagues. Romer played a single major league game in 1903 for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Dentistry

After graduating, Grey established his practice in New York City under the name of Dr. Zane Grey in 1896. It was a competitive area but he wanted to be close to publishers. He began to write in the evening to offset the tedium of his dental practice. He struggled financially and emotionally. Grey was a natural writer but his early efforts were stiff and grammatically weak. Whenever possible, he played baseball with the Orange Athletic Club in New Jersey, a team of former collegiate players that was one of the best amateur teams in the country.

Grey often went camping with his brother R.C. in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where they fished in the upper Delaware River. When canoeing in 1900, Grey met seventeen-year-old Lina Roth, better known as Dolly. Dolly came from a family of physicians and was studying to be a schoolteacher.

Marriage and family

After a passionate and intense courtship marked by frequent quarrels, Grey and Dolly married five years later in 1905. Grey suffered bouts of depression, anger, and mood swings, which affected him most of his life. As he described it, A hyena lying in ambush—that is my black spell! I conquered one mood only to fall prey to the next ... I wandered about like a lost soul or a man who was conscious of imminent death.

The Zane Grey Museum in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania

During his courtship of Dolly, Grey still saw previous girlfriends and warned her frankly,

But I love to be free. I cannot change my spots. The ordinary man is satisfied with a moderate income, a home, wife, children, and all that. ... But I am a million miles from being that kind of man and no amount of trying will ever do any good ... I shall never lose the spirit of my interest in women.

After they married in 1905, Dolly gave up her teaching career. They moved to a farmhouse at the confluence of the Lackawaxen and Delaware rivers, in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where Grey's mother and sister joined them. (This house, now preserved and operated as the Zane Grey Museum, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.) Grey finally ceased his dental practice to work full-time on his nascent literary pursuits. Dolly's inheritance provided an initial financial cushion.

Writing career

While Dolly managed Grey's career and raised their three children, including son Romer Zane Grey, over the next two decades Grey often spent months away from the family. He fished, wrote, and spent time with his many mistresses. While Dolly knew of his behavior, she seemed to view it as his handicap rather than a choice. Throughout their life together, he highly valued her management of his career and their family, and her solid emotional support. In addition to her considerable editorial skills, she had good business sense and handled all his contract negotiations with publishers, agents, and movie studios. All his income was split fifty-fifty with her; from her share, she covered all family expenses. Their considerable correspondence shows evidence of his lasting love for her despite his infidelities and personal emotional turmoil.

Picture taken by Zane Grey of Tse-ne-gat, one of the fighters during the Bluff War

The Greys moved to California in 1918. In 1920 they settled in Altadena, California, at a home later known as the 'Zane Grey Estate'. In Altadena Grey also spent time with his mistress Brenda Montenegro. The two met while hiking Eaton Canyon. Of her he wrote,

I saw her flowing raven mane against the rocks of the canyon. I have seen the red skin of the Navajo, and the olive of the Spaniards, but her ... her skin looked as if her Creator had in that instant molded her just for me. I thought it was an apparition. She seemed to be the embodiment of the West I portray in my books, open and wild.

Grey summed up his feelings for the city: In Altadena, I have found those qualities that make life worth living.

With the help of Dolly's proofreading and copy editing, Grey gradually improved his writing. His first magazine article, A Day on the Delaware, a human-interest story about a Grey brothers' fishing expedition, was published in the May 1902 issue of Recreation magazine. Elated at selling the article, Grey offered reprints to patients in his waiting room. In writing, Grey found temporary escape from the harshness of his life and his demons. Realism is death to me. I cannot stand life as it is. By this time, he had given up baseball.

Grey read Owen Wister's great Western novel The Virginian. After studying its style and structure in detail, he decided to write a full-length work. Grey had difficulties in writing his first novel, Betty Zane (1903). When it was rejected by Harper & Brothers, he lapsed into despair. The novel dramatized the heroism of an ancestor who had saved Fort Henry. He self-published it, perhaps with funds provided by his wife Dolly or his brother R. C.'s wealthy girlfriend Reba Smith. From the beginning, vivid description was the strongest aspect of his writing.

After attending a lecture in New York in 1907 by Charles Jesse Buffalo Jones, western hunter and guide who had co-founded Garden City, Kansas, Grey arranged for a mountain lion-hunting trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. He brought along a camera to document his trips and prove his adventures. He also began the habit of taking copious notes, not only of scenery and activities but of dialogue. His first two trips were arduous, but Grey learned much from his compatriot adventurers. He gained the confidence to write convincingly about the American West, its characters, and its landscape. Treacherous river crossings, unpredictable beasts, bone-chilling cold, searing heat, parching thirst, bad water, irascible tempers, and heroic cooperation all became real to him. He wrote, Surely, of all the gifts that have come to me from contact with the West, this one of sheer love of wildness, beauty, color, grandeur, has been the greatest, the most significant for my work.

Upon returning home in 1909, Grey wrote a new novel, The Last of the Plainsmen, describing the adventures of Buffalo Jones. Harper's editor Ripley Hitchcock rejected it, the fourth work in a row. He told Grey, I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction. Grey wrote dejectedly,

I don't know which way to turn. I cannot decide what to write next. That which I desire to write does not seem to be what the editors want ... I am full of stories and zeal and fire ... yet I am inhibited by doubt, by fear that my feeling for life is false.

Picture taken by Zane Grey of Tse-ne-gat, one of the fighters during the Bluff War

The book was later published by the American magazine, Outing, which provided Grey some satisfaction. Grey next wrote a series of magazine articles and juvenile novels.

With the birth of his first child pending, Grey felt compelled to complete his next novel, The Heritage of the Desert. He wrote it in four months in 1910. It quickly became a bestseller. Grey took his next work to Hitchcock again; this time Harper published his work, a historical romance in which Mormon characters were of central importance. Grey continued to write popular novels about Manifest Destiny, the conquest of the Old West, and the behavior of men in elemental conditions.[citation needed]

Two years later Grey produced his best-known book, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), his all-time best-seller, and one of the most successful Western novels of all time. Hitchcock rejected it, but Grey took his manuscript directly to the vice president of Harper, who accepted it. The novel had a sequel (The Rainbow Trail in 1915), and was filmed five times (in 1918, 1925, 1931, 1941 and 1996; but in later film versions the villains are corrupt judges or lawyers, not polygamous Mormons).

As Zane Grey had become a household name, after that Harper eagerly received all his manuscripts. Other publishers caught on to the commercial potential of the Western novel. Max Brand and Ernest Haycox were among the most notable of other writers of Westerns. Grey's publishers paired his novels with some of the best illustrators of the time, including N. C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, Douglas Duer, W. Herbert Dunton, W. H. D. Koerner, and Charles Russell.

Grey had the time and money to engage in his first and greatest passion: fishing. From 1918 until 1932, he was a regular contributor to Outdoor Life magazine. As one of its first celebrity writers, he began to popularize big-game fishing. Several times he went deep-sea fishing in Florida to relax and to write in solitude. Although he commented that the sea, from which all life springs, has been equally with the desert my teacher and religion, Grey was unable to write a great sea novel. He felt the sea soothed his moods, reduced his depressions, and gained him the opportunity to harvest deeper thoughts:

The lure of the sea is some strange magic that makes men love what they fear. The solitude of the desert is more intimate than that of the sea. Death on the shifting barren sands seems less insupportable to the imagination than death out on the boundless ocean, in the awful, windy emptiness. Man's bones yearn for dust.

Over the years, Grey spent part of his time traveling and the rest of the year writing novels and articles. Unlike writers who could write every day, Grey would have dry spells and then sudden bursts of energy, in which he could write as much as 100,000 words in a month. He encountered fans in most places. He visited the Rogue River in Oregon in 1919 for a fishing expedition, and fell in love with it. He returned in the 1920s, eventually setting up a cabin on the lower Rogue River. Grey captured the river's essence in two books: Tales of Freshwater Fishing and Rogue River Feud. Other excursions took him to Washington state and Wyoming.

From 1923 to 1930, he spent a few weeks a year at his cabin on the Mogollon Rim, in Central Arizona. After years of abandonment and decay, the cabin was restored in 1966 by Bill Goettl, a Phoenix air conditioning magnate. He opened it to the public as a free-of-charge museum. The Dude Fire destroyed the cabin in 1990. It was later reconstructed 25 miles away in the town of Payson.

During the 1930s, Grey continued to write, but the Great Depression hurt the publishing industry. His sales fell off, and he found it more difficult to sell serializations. He had avoided making investments that would have been affected by the stock market crash of 1929, and continued to earn royalty income, so he did better than many financially. Nearly half of the film adaptations of his novels were made in the 1930s.

From 1925 to his death in 1939, Grey traveled more and further from his family. He became interested in exploring unspoiled lands, particularly the islands of the South Pacific, New Zealand and Australia. He thought Arizona was beginning to be overrun by tourists and speculators. Near the end of his life, Grey looked into the future and wrote:

Zane Grey at Koala Park holding a koala during a visit to Australia in December 1935

The so-called civilization of man and his works shall perish from the earth, while the shifting sands, the red looming walls, the purple sage, and the towering monuments, the vast brooding range show no perceptible change.

Reception by critics

The more books Grey sold, the more the established critics, such as Heywood Broun and Burton Rascoe, attacked him. They claimed his depictions of the West were too fanciful, too violent, and not faithful to the moral realities of the frontier. They thought his characters unrealistic and much larger-than-life. Broun stated that the substance of any two Zane Grey books could be written upon the back of a postage stamp.

T. K. Whipple praised a typical Grey novel as a modern version of the ancient Beowulf saga,

a battle of passions with one another and with the will, a struggle of love and hate, or remorse and revenge, of blood, lust, honor, friendship, anger, grief—all of a grand scale and all incalculable and mysterious. But he also criticized Grey's writing, His style, for example, has the stiffness which comes from an imperfect mastery of the medium. It lacks fluency and facility.

Grey based his work in his own varied first-hand experience, supported by careful note-taking, and considerable research. Despite his great popular success and fortune, Grey read the reviews and sometimes became paralyzed by negative emotions after critical ones.

In 1923, a reviewer said Grey's moral ideas ... [were] decidedly askew. Grey reacted with a 20-page treatise, My Answer to the Critics. He defended his intentions to produce great literature in the setting of the Old West. He suggested that critics should ask his readers what they think of his books, and noted actor and fan John Barrymore as an example. Dolly warned him against publishing the treatise, and he retreated from a public confrontation.

His novel The Vanishing American (1925), first serialized in The Ladies' Home Journal in 1922, prompted a heated debate. People recognized its Navajo hero as patterned after Jim Thorpe, a great Native American athlete. Grey portrayed the struggle of the Navajo to preserve their identity and culture against corrupting influences of the white government and of missionaries. This viewpoint enraged religious groups. Grey contended, I have studied the Navaho Indians for 12 years. I know their wrongs. The missionaries sent out there are almost everyone mean, vicious, weak, immoral, useless men. To have the book published, Grey agreed to some structural changes. With this book, Grey completed the most productive period of his writing career, having laid out most major themes, character types, and settings.

His Wanderer of the Wasteland is a thinly disguised autobiography. One of his books, Tales of the Angler's El Dorado, New Zealand, helped establish the Bay of Islands in New Zealand as a premier game fishing area. Several of his later writings (e.g. Rangle River) were based in Australia.[citation needed]

Fishing

Grey co-founded the Porpoise Club with his friend, Robert H. Davis of Munsey's Magazine, to popularize the sport of hunting of dolphins and porpoises. They made their first catch off Seabright, New Jersey on September 21, 1912, where they harpooned and reeled in a bottlenose dolphin.

Grey's son Loren claims in the introduction to Tales of Tahitian Waters that Zane Grey fished on average 300 days a year through his adult life. Grey and his brother R.C. were frequent visitors to Long Key, Florida, where they helped to establish the Long Key Fishing Club, built by Henry Morrison Flagler. Zane Grey was its president from 1917 to 1920. He pioneered the fishing of Boohoo fish (sailfish). Zane Grey Creek was named for him.

Grey indulged his interest in fishing with visits to Australia and New Zealand. He first visited New Zealand in 1926 and caught several large fish of great variety, including a mako shark, a ferocious fighter which presented a new challenge. Grey established a base at Otehei Bay, Urupukapuka Island in the Bay of Islands, which became a destination for the rich and famous. He wrote many articles in international sporting magazines highlighting the uniqueness of New Zealand fishing, which has produced heavy-tackle world records for the major billfish, striped marlin, black marlin, blue marlin and broadbill. A lodge and camp were established at Otehei Bay in 1927 called the Zane Grey Sporting Club. He held numerous world records during this time and invented the teaser, a hookless bait that is still used today to attract fish. Grey made three additional fishing trips to New Zealand. The second was January to April 1927, the third December 1928 to March 1929, and the last from December 1932 to February 1933.

Grey fished out of Wedgeport, Nova Scotia, for many summers.

Grey also helped establish deep-sea sport fishing in New South Wales, Australia, particularly in Bermagui, which is famous for marlin fishing. Patron of the Bermagui Sport Fishing Association for 1936 and 1937, Grey set a number of world records, and wrote of his experiences in his book An American Angler in Australia.

From 1928 on, Grey was a frequent visitor to Tahiti. He fished the surrounding waters several months at a time and maintained a permanent fishing camp at Vairao. He claimed that these were the most difficult waters he had ever fished, but from these waters he also took some of his most important records, such as the first marlin over 1,000 pounds.[citation needed]

Grey had built a getaway home in Santa Catalina Island, California, which once served as the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel. He served as president of Catalina's exclusive fishing club, the Tuna Club of Avalon.

Death

Zane Grey died of heart failure on October 23, 1939, at his home in Altadena, California. He was interred at the Lackawaxen and Union Cemetery, Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania.

About Book:

The Lone Star Ranger is a Western novel published by Zane Grey in 1915. The book takes place in Texas, the Lone Star State, and several main characters are Texas Rangers, a famous band of highly capable law enforcement officers. It follows the life of Buck Duane, a man who becomes an outlaw and then redeems himself in the eyes of the law.

The novel was dedicated to the Texas Ranger John Hughes.

Plot introduction

Buck Duane is the son of a famous outlaw. Though an outlaw is not always a criminal, if the Rangers say he is an outlaw, it's just as bad – he's a hunted man. After killing a man in self-defense, Duane is forced to 'go on the dodge'. Duane turns up at an outlaw's hideout, still revolting at the idea of outlawry. Worse still, all the men he kills haunt him, for years. At the outlaw hideout, he meets a kidnapped, beautiful young woman and desires to see her free.

In the second part of the book, Duane joins the Rangers, who want him to help to clear the frontier of major cattle rustlers and bank robbers, in return for the governor's pardon of his illegal deeds.

Part 1

The Outlaw

Chapter

1

So it was in him, then—an inherited fighting instinct, a driving intensity to kill. He was the last of the Duanes, that old fighting stock of Texas. But not the memory of his dead father, nor the pleading of his soft-voiced mother, nor the warning of this uncle who stood before him now, had brought to Buck Duane so much realization of the dark passionate strain in his blood. It was the recurrence, a hundred-fold increased in power, of a strange emotion that for the last three years had arisen in him.

Yes, Cal Bain's in town, full of bad whisky an' huntin' for you, repeated the elder man, gravely.

It's the second time, muttered Duane, as if to himself.

Son, you can't avoid a meetin'. Leave town till Cal sobers up. He ain't got it in for you when he's not drinkin'.

But what's he want me for? demanded Duane. To insult me again? I won't stand that twice.

He's got a fever that's rampant in Texas these days, my boy. He wants gun-play. If he meets you he'll try to kill you.

Here it stirred in Duane again, that bursting gush of blood, like a wind of flame shaking all his inner being, and subsiding to leave him strangely chilled.

Kill me! What for? he asked.

Lord knows there ain't any reason. But what's that to do with most of the shootin' these days? Didn't five cowboys over to Everall's kill one another dead all because they got to jerkin' at a quirt among themselves? An' Cal has no reason to love you. His girl was sweet on you.

I quit when I found out she was his girl.

I reckon she ain't quit. But never mind her or reasons. Cal's here, just drunk enough to be ugly. He's achin' to kill somebody. He's one of them four-flush gun-fighters. He'd like to be thought bad. There's a lot of wild cowboys who're ambitious for a reputation. They talk about how quick they are on the draw. T hey ape Bland an' King Fisher an' Hardin an' all the big outlaws. They make threats about joinin' the gangs along the Rio Grande. They laugh at the sheriffs an' brag about how they'd fix the rangers. Cal's sure not much for you to bother with, if you only keep out of his way.

You mean for me to run? asked Duane, in scorn.

I reckon I wouldn't put it that way. Just avoid him. Buck, I'm not afraid Cal would get you if you met down there in town. You've your father's eye an' his slick hand with a gun. What I'm most afraid of is that you'll kill Bain.

Duane was silent, letting his uncle's earnest words sink in, trying to realize their significance.

If Texas ever recovers from that fool war an' kills off these outlaws, why, a young man will have a lookout, went on the uncle. You're twenty-three now, an' a powerful sight of a fine fellow, barrin' your temper. You've a chance in life. But if you go gun-fightin', if you kill a man, you're ruined. Then you'll kill another. It'll be the same old story. An' the rangers would make you an outlaw. The rangers mean law an' order for Texas. This even-break business doesn't work with them. If you resist arrest they'll kill you. If you submit to arrest, then you go to jail, an' mebbe you hang.

I'd never hang, muttered Duane, darkly.

I reckon you wouldn't, replied the old man. You'd be like your father. He was ever ready to draw—too ready. In times like these, with the Texas rangers enforcin' the law, your Dad would have been driven to the river. An', son, I'm afraid you're a chip off the old block. Can't you hold in—keep your temper—run away from trouble? Because it'll only result in you gettin' the worst of it in the end. Your father was killed in a street-fight. An' it was told of him that he shot twice after a bullet had passed through his heart. Think of the terrible nature of a man to be able to do that. If you have any such blood in you, never give it a chance.

What you say is all very well, uncle, returned Duane, "but the only way out for me is to run, and I won't do it. Cal Bain and his outfit have already made me look like a coward. He says I'm afraid to come out and