Recovering the Stolen Loot, part 1

 

Devil's Butte, by Ray Hogan, was published as an Ace Double (with Brian Wynne's A Badge for a Badman on the flip side) in 1967. 

Wynne was a pen name for Brian Garfield

As is typical of an Ace Double Western, the novel starts out with a bang and continues pretty much non-stop. The Ace Doubles were short, so a good storyteller knew he had no time to waste. There is nothing extraneous, no complex subplots, no verbose prose. Everything is boiled down to telling an entertaining story without waste or gristle.

Ray Hogan does just that. We meet Dave Bonner while he is riding towards the large Pitchfork ranch. He's carrying $3000 in cash to buy cattle for both his small ranch and for some of the other ranches that neighbor his own.

This is important. Not all the money belongs to Dave and people other than himself are trusting him to get back with the cattle he is supposed to buy.

So when four men rob him, then leave him out in the desert without gun, water or a horse, Dave isn't just trying to survive. Beyond figuring out how not to die, he has GOT to get that money back. His friends are depending on him.

So we start out with a trek through the searing desert. Getting to a town, Bonner manages to acquire a horse and a pistol. He begins to track down the outlaws. Soon, he kills one of them, but the dead man isn't carrying any of his money.

The trail takes him to the Pitchfork ranch, were he finds out that three of the outlaws are ranch hands there. The fourth--well, he's the adopted son of the ranch's owner, in whose eyes he can do no wrong. Dave finds himself accused of murder, which in turn leads to a Last Stand situation at a place called Devil's Butte. Though the ranch owner's pretty daughter has allied herself with Dave (she's known her adopted brother had gone bad for some time now), Dave is outnumbered and outgunned.

But he's good with the gun he has and he has a knack for improvising clever plans. The odds are against him, but perhaps he can think and fight his way out of the trap he's in, prove his innocence and recover his money.

Hogan's plot construction is sound and, if the characterizations are basic, the protagonists are likeable and the villains are appropriately vile. And the ending, where the rancher finally confronts his wayward son, has a nice level of emotional impact to it. Devil's Butte is a fun and worthwhile read. 

This novel reminded me of another "recover the stolen loot" Western I once read and, for a specific reason, have a particular attachment to. Sometime within the next few weeks, I'll review that one as well.