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    The Toughest Ranger
    The Toughest Ranger
    The Toughest Ranger
    Ebook148 pages1 hour

    The Toughest Ranger

    By L. Ron Hubbard

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    A perfect role for a young Robert Redford, saddle tramp Petey McGuire doesn’t have much to live for. The trail in front of him stretches out long and hot, and there’s no end in sight. He’s been beaten down, beaten up, and kicked around so long, he’d run away from his own shadow if he could. But there’s one fight he can’t run from—the fight against hunger.

    Petey needs a job quick, before he drops dead in the dust. But the only way to get one is to act cool and talk tough—in other words, become the exact opposite of Petey McGuire. Putting on a performance worthy of a Shakespearean actor, he succeeds all too well—landing in the saddle with the Arizona Rangers.

    Talking tough is one thing, but backing it up is another. Because Petey’s about to discover exactly what it takes—and how much he has to risk—to face the meanest outlaw, win the prettiest girl, and become The Toughest Ranger.

    Born and raised in the twilight of the Old West—from Nebraska plain to the mountains of Montana—L. Ron Hubbard grew up in the company of real cowboys and rugged frontiersmen, even becoming a blood brother to a Blackfoot medicine man. His firsthand knowledge allowed him to instill a grit and authenticity into his stories that made him one of the leading writers of Westerns, publishing a total of 34 of them by the 1950s.

    Also includes the Western adventures, Silent Pards, in which an old prospector takes on a couple of wicked enemies with the help of some surprising friends, and The Ranch That No One Would Buy, the story of a young stranger who’s about to pull off a killer of a deception.

    “An exciting Western story filled with both action and adventure.” —Mommy’s Favorite Things

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGalaxy Press
    Release dateJun 21, 2011
    ISBN9781592126231
    Author

    L. Ron Hubbard

    With 19 New York Times bestsellers and more than 350 million copies of his works in circulation, L. Ron Hubbard is among the most enduring and widely read authors of our time. As a leading light of American Pulp Fiction through the 1930s and '40s, he is further among the most influential authors of the modern age. Indeed, from Ray Bradbury to Stephen King, there is scarcely a master of imaginative tales who has not paid tribute to L. Ron Hubbard. Then too, of course, there is all L. Ron Hubbard represents as the Founder of Dianetics and Scientology and thus the only major religion born in the 20th century.

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    • 4/5
      Another in a great line of pulp from L. Ron Hubbard! Two true Western tales and a quick prospectors tale all in one book! Fun stories of bravado, modesty and danger that all come quickly to life in your imagination. I can't say enough good things. Simple, but well-written, stories that will transport you! Give this book a read!

    Book preview

    The Toughest Ranger - L. Ron Hubbard

    Book cover

    SELECTED FICTION WORKS

    BY L. RON HUBBARD

    FANTASY

    The Case of the Friendly Corpse

    Death’s Deputy

    Fear

    The Ghoul

    The Indigestible Triton

    Slaves of Sleep & The Masters of Sleep

    Typewriter in the Sky

    The Ultimate Adventure

    SCIENCE FICTION

    Battlefield Earth

    The Conquest of Space

    The End Is Not Yet

    Final Blackout

    The Kilkenny Cats

    The Kingslayer

    The Mission Earth Dekalogy*

    Ole Doc Methuselah

    To the Stars

    ADVENTURE

    The Hell Job series

    WESTERN

    Buckskin Brigades

    Empty Saddles

    Guns of Mark Jardine

    Hot Lead Payoff

    A full list of L. Ron Hubbard’s

    novellas and short stories is provided at the back.

    *Dekalogy: a group of ten volumes

    TitlePgArt.jpg

    Published by

    Galaxy Press, LLC

    7051 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 200

    Hollywood, CA 90028

    © 2012 L. Ron Hubbard Library. All Rights Reserved.

    Any unauthorized copying, translation, duplication, importation or distribution, in whole or in part, by any means, including electronic copying, storage or transmission, is a violation of applicable laws.

    Mission Earth is a trademark owned by L. Ron Hubbard Library and is used with permission. Battlefield Earth is a trademark owned by Author Services, Inc. and is used with permission.

    Horsemen illustration; Glossary illustration; cover artwork thumbnail on back cover and The Toughest Ranger and Silent Pards story illustrations from Western Story Magazine are © and ™ Condé Nast Publications and are used with their permission. Fantasy, Far-Flung Adventure and Science Fiction illustrations: Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction copyright © by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Penny Publications, LLC.

    ISBN 978-1-59212-623-1 ePub version

    ISBN 978-1-59212-375-9 print version

    ISBN 978-1-59212-381-0 audiobook version

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2007903537

    Contents

    FOREWORD

    THE TOUGHEST RANGER

    CHAPTER ONE

    CHAPTER TWO

    CHAPTER THREE

    CHAPTER FOUR

    CHAPTER FIVE

    CHAPTER SIX

    CHAPTER SEVEN

    CHAPTER EIGHT

    THE RANCH THAT

    NO ONE WOULD BUY

    SILENT PARDS

    CHAPTER ONE

    CHAPTER TWO

    CHAPTER THREE

    CHAPTER FOUR

    STORY PREVIEW:

    THE MAGIC QUIRT

    L. RON HUBBARD

    IN THE GOLDEN AGE

    OF PULP FICTION

    THE STORIES FROM THE

    GOLDEN AGE

    GLOSSARY

    FOREWORD

    Stories from Pulp Fiction’s Golden Age

    AND it was a golden age.

    The 1930s and 1940s were a vibrant, seminal time for a gigantic audience of eager readers, probably the largest per capita audience of readers in American history. The magazine racks were chock-full of publications with ragged trims, garish cover art, cheap brown pulp paper, low cover prices—and the most excitement you could hold in your hands.

    Pulp magazines, named for their rough-cut, pulpwood paper, were a vehicle for more amazing tales than Scheherazade could have told in a million and one nights. Set apart from higher-class slick magazines, printed on fancy glossy paper with quality artwork and superior production values, the pulps were for the rest of us, adventure story after adventure story for people who liked to read. Pulp fiction authors were no-holds-barred entertainers—real storytellers. They were more interested in a thrilling plot twist, a horrific villain or a white-knuckle adventure than they were in lavish prose or convoluted metaphors.

    The sheer volume of tales released during this wondrous golden age remains unmatched in any other period of literary history—hundreds of thousands of published stories in over nine hundred different magazines. Some titles lasted only an issue or two; many magazines succumbed to paper shortages during World War II, while others endured for decades yet. Pulp fiction remains as a treasure trove of stories you can read, stories you can love, stories you can remember. The stories were driven by plot and character, with grand heroes, terrible villains, beautiful damsels (often in distress), diabolical plots, amazing places, breathless romances. The readers wanted to be taken beyond the mundane, to live adventures far removed from their ordinary lives—and the pulps rarely failed to deliver.

    In that regard, pulp fiction stands in the tradition of all memorable literature. For as history has shown, good stories are much more than fancy prose. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas—many of the greatest literary figures wrote their fiction for the readers, not simply literary colleagues and academic admirers. And writers for pulp magazines were no exception. These publications reached an audience that dwarfed the circulations of today’s short story magazines. Issues of the pulps were scooped up and read by over thirty million avid readers each month.

    Because pulp fiction writers were often paid no more than a cent a word, they had to become prolific or starve. They also had to write aggressively. As Richard Kyle, publisher and editor of Argosy, the first and most long-lived of the pulps, so pointedly explained: The pulp magazine writers, the best of them, worked for markets that did not write for critics or attempt to satisfy timid advertisers. Not having to answer to anyone other than their readers, they wrote about human beings on the edges of the unknown, in those new lands the future would explore. They wrote for what we would become, not for what we had already been.

    Some of the more lasting names that graced the pulps include H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein—and, of course, L. Ron Hubbard.

    In a word, he was among the most prolific and popular writers of the era. He was also the most enduring—hence this series—and certainly among the most legendary. It all began only months after he first tried his hand at fiction, with L. Ron Hubbard tales appearing in Thrilling Adventures, Argosy, Five-Novels Monthly, Detective Fiction Weekly, Top-Notch, Texas Ranger, War Birds, Western Stories, even Romantic Range. He could write on any subject, in any genre, from jungle explorers to deep-sea divers, from G-men and gangsters, cowboys and flying aces to mountain climbers, hard-boiled detectives and spies. But he really began to shine when he turned his talent to science fiction and fantasy of which he authored nearly fifty novels or novelettes to forever change the shape of those genres.

    Following in the tradition of such famed authors as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, Ron Hubbard actually lived adventures that his own characters would have admired—as an ethnologist among primitive tribes, as prospector and engineer in hostile climes, as a captain of vessels on four oceans. He even wrote a series of articles for Argosy, called Hell Job, in which he lived and told of the most dangerous professions a man could put his hand to.

    Finally, and just for good measure, he was also an accomplished photographer, artist, filmmaker, musician and educator. But he was first and foremost a writer, and that’s the L. Ron Hubbard we come to know through the pages of this volume.

    This library of Stories from the Golden Age presents the best of L. Ron Hubbard’s fiction from the heyday of storytelling, the Golden Age of the pulp magazines. In these eighty volumes, readers are treated to a full banquet of 153 stories, a kaleidoscope of tales representing every imaginable genre: science fiction, fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, horror, even romance—action of all kinds and in all places.

    Because the pulps themselves were printed on such inexpensive paper with high acid content, issues were not meant to endure. As the years go by, the original issues of every pulp from Argosy through Zeppelin Stories continue crumbling into brittle, brown dust. This library preserves the L. Ron Hubbard tales from that era, presented with a distinctive look that brings back the nostalgic flavor of those times.

    L. Ron Hubbard’s Stories from the Golden Age has something for every taste, every reader. These tales will return you to a time when fiction was good clean entertainment and the most fun a kid could have on a rainy afternoon or the best thing an adult could enjoy after a long day at work.

    Pick up a volume, and remember what reading is supposed to be all about. Remember curling up with a great story.

    —Kevin J. Anderson

    KEVIN J. ANDERSON is the author of more than ninety critically acclaimed works of speculative fiction, including The Saga of Seven Suns, the continuation of the Dune Chronicles with Brian Herbert, and his New York Times bestselling novelization of L. Ron Hubbard’s Ai! Pedrito!

    The Toughest Ranger

    Chapter One

    THE Arizona sun beat pitilessly down upon the dun plain and warped and baked the tired trees which drooped about the ’dobe ranch house.

    The road, little more than two wagon tracks, started in a joined point on one horizon and ended in another point at the western limit of the plain. It was endless, that road, endless and dry and hot. And down it came Petey McGuire, leading his horse, the little sorrel named Pat.

    Petey McGuire’s high heels were run over; his Stetson was shapeless; his jeans were worn through at the knees. About his waist hung suspended from scraped leather an old Peacemaker. His young face was haggard and

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