INTRODUCTION

 

Hearts of the West is a collection of nine deathless tales demonstrating that when the men and women who made the frontier met – bullets and passions both flamed.  Stories, in short, of rangeland action and romance.

Romance and westerns?  Isn't that contradiction in terms.  Aren't westerns all tough-guy gunfighter tales written for men by men?  And aren't romances all about swooning women in ruffled dresses being crushed in some well-bred man's arms in a castle somewhere or beneath a looming ancestral manse, written for women by women?

Er…  No.  Not now – and not ever. 

Women have always written westerns, and been among the leading western novelists.  One of the bestselling western novelists of the 1920s-30s (considered the Golden Age of the genre), was Bertha M.  Bower (albeit writing the nom-de-plume "B.M.  Bower").  Today many of the bestselling new western authors are women, including Sylvia McDaniel and Connie Mason.  Conversely, men have always numbered among the leading romance novelists, frequently as with the transparent Edwina Noon, cloaking their gender under pseudonyms or initials, occasionally as with Ben Ames Williams, author of Leave Her to Heaven, defying all odds by winning a female readership under their masculine cognomen. 

Though it seems to defy the popular conception of things, research indicates that far from being uninterested in romance, men are often more romantic about love and marriage than women.  That they have a romantic bent just as strong as women's becomes immediately apparent when you pause to consider the books and movies that have traditionally been aimed at men.  No one would deny their tough-guy, little-boy hero fantasies, of course, but almost all also have a strong love story threaded through them as well.  Who thinks of Tarzan without thinking of Jane, or Robin Hood without Maid Marion, or, to mix metaphors, of Roy Rogers without Dale Evans?  It's a well known economic truism in publishing and filmmaking circle that a story with nothing but male characters, and no love interest, won't go over with male audiences – except under very unusual circumstances.  The exceptions, which can be counted on a very limited number of fingers, are remembered precisely because they are exceptions.  The early Tom Clancy novels are one example.  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is another.  On the other hand, here are some of typical blurbs publishers used to hawk the books of Jackson Gregory, one of the leading Golden Age male western novelists, to male readers: Man to Man, "How Steve won his game and the gal he loved is a story filled with breathless situations."  The Short Cut, "Wayne is suspected of killing his brother after a quarrel.  Financial complications, a horse-race and beautiful Wanda, make up a thrilling romance."

As for romances being about swooning women, they seem to have swooned more often in male fiction than in romance novels penned by women.  It's difficult to imagine the average woman of any era, in the midst of deaths and births, family illnesses and crisis, feeling very sympathetic to a heroine who fainted at a dramatic turn of the plot.  Or the average woman writer feeling that way either.  The women in romances tend to be self-reliant and adventurous – just consider Scarlett O'Hara – not unlike their authors and audiences.  Plenty of them helped settle the West, too.  Of course, women are crushed in their lover's arms in romance novels – they are about romance, after all.  But they also crushed those men in their arms, nursed those men, fought those men, and worked alongside them in the fields. 

That western tales have an appeal to both men and women, and that the romantic elements are part of the appeal for both is shown in the following, now little-known, publishing fact.  When the pulp magazines – those oversized things with the lurid covers, and equally lurid fictions, printed on rough, crumbly paper that you sometimes see on the web or at collectors' conventions – died in the late 1940s and early 1950s, their audiences were deserting them for television.  Why bother to laboriously read a western story, say, when you could just lay back, relax and passively have one shown to you on TV?  However, a single pulp outlived the rest. In fact, it survived them by more than a decade and lasted on (though reduced in size to that of an astrology magazine) until the early 1960s when it at last gave up the gasp and expired, victim of an electronic assassin as fatal as the notorious Billy the Kid.  The name of that legendary pulp was … Ranch Romances!  It alone won enough male and female readers to justify its existence.

So here are nine classic ranchland romances – a unique collection of nine classic frontier tales that combine action and romance.  Drawn from long defunct publications of the 1930s and '40s, Hearts of the West brings back for today's reading audience neglected stories that would otherwise go forgotten.  In "Guardian Angel," a cowboy who doesn't think he needs anyone's help, and a woman who thinks he does, must deal with the treachery and cunning of a criminal family.  In "Frontier Spirit," a well-bred society girl proves she's got that very quality to a doubting cowboy, but not until they have both faced bandit guns.  In "Pioneer Woman" by John and Ward Hawkins (latterly stalwarts of television's Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie ), a woman and frontiersman discover their greatest peril on a wagon train west is not the hardships of the trail but her abusive, murderous husband.  In "Cup of Happiness," a woman determined to succeed on her own in the far northwest, and a man keeping a secret, must battle nature, epidemic and claim-jumpers – if they are to live and quaff their own cup of happiness.  In "Blue Eyes and Blue Steel," a spirited cowgirl doesn't turn back when she finds herself on the trail of desperado Diamond Jack McLernan, while the man she's after finds himself falling in love with her.  In "The Marquis and Miss Sally," cow camp friendship turns to romance despite a seemingly impossible obstacle, in a rollicking tale only the inimitable master of literary surprise, O. Henry, could have penned.  In "The End of the Trail," a man of mixed parentage learns from a storekeeper's daughter – with the assistance of one of the West's real-life heroines – that it isn't what you do before a fight, but afterward that determines who the winner is.  In "The B-girl, the Battle and the Bar-D," two people who have been deeply scarred by life discover why, if they can survive it, the West is the ideal place for starting over.  In "Big Nose Kate's Man," the famous, if slightly shady, lady shows why she's earned her own place in frontier legend when her lover, the legendary Doc Holliday, faces a lynching (based on an actual event).

GUARDIAN ANGEL

Gene Austin

 

JEFF Suller was let out of the cell by Marshal Pete Peters, who crooked a finger at him and said, "Come along."

Jeff ambled out of the cell, his backside cramped from so much sitting down.  He was pleased but curious.

"How come you're lettin' me out, Pete?" he asked, following Pete's fat back toward the front office.  When he passed the cell on the end nearest the front, he momentarily lost interest in Pete's reply.  A mean face appeared between the bars of that cell and called him a dirty name.

Jeff stopped and started to hunch up like a porcupine ready for battle.  But Pete Peters had been expecting it, apparently, and grabbed him by the arm and pulled him through the office door, which he immediately slammed shut.

"Don't go giving me cause to lock you up again," Pete said.  "You oughtn't to let them Wimmles get you so mad.  You ought to learn to control your temper.  Over there at the desk is your effects."

Jeff looked toward the desk, blinking.  It contained more than his confiscated pocket property.  Besides his penknife, stub pencil, and several .44 cartridges, there was a girl perched on the corner of the desk: Miss Susan Shepard, who was smiling at him brightly.

"Wait a minute," Jeff said, stopping short.  "What's Susie doin' in here?"

"Whyn't you ask her?" Pete drawled sleepily.

"All right," Jeff said.  He advanced suspiciously toward Susie Shepard, whose smile trembled a little.

"You don't have to ask!" Susie said quickly, and took a deep breath.  "You've just been paroled, Jeff.  Isn't that nice?  I mean, now you can round up those cattle which Mr. Johnson wanted to buy and–"

"Right," Jeff said, feeling very fine.  "And here I thought I was goin' to have to spend thirty days in jail and not get nothin'!"  His eyes narrowed again.  "But you ain't gone and answered where you come in, Susie."

Jeff was extraordinarily mistrustful of Susie, for the reason that she had been trying to rope him for some time – and in face of his protests that his heart belonged elsewhere.  Now she was grinning from ear to ear.

"Why, Jeff, you're paroled in my custody!  You're a minor, you know, and I paid your fine."

Jeff stared at her in petrification.  Then suddenly he was looking into the mustached face of Pete Peters, who had stepped in front of him and was glaring at him.

"I didn't approve of it," Pete informed him.  "This roughnecking has got to stop.  But Miss Shepard talked me into it and you better toe the line or you'll be looking through those bars again.  Case dismissed – get the hell out of here!"

Pete forced his junk into his hand and propelled him toward the door; Jeff found himself in the hot street, with the sun glaring off the sides of adobe buildings, and with Susie's hand tucked in the crook of his elbow.

"You see," Susie was saying, "I'm an adult, being twenty-one, and you're not, and you're in my custody and I'm responsible for you.  Over here's my buggy."

Jeff allowed himself to be set in the driver's seat of the buggy.  It was very mystifying.  As a matter of fact, there was only two months difference in his own and Susie's ages.  But she was on the long side of twenty-one and he still had a month to go.  Which apparently made it legal for her to–

Jeff suddenly swore as the whole diabolical plot came clear to him.  He looked angrily at Susie.

"It won't work!  You're figurin' this'll give you an excuse to hang around and try to vamp me."  He crossed his arms firmly.  "But you ain't foolin' anybody but yourself.  Now I'm out of jail and got a sale for two hundred head of cattle, I aim to marry Oba Demerrest.  I just been waitin' for some money."