Summary
A lone rider in midnight-gray kepi, Jack—numbered 44 on the roster of Pennsylvania’s granite-jawed mounted legion—finds the path of duty corkscrewing straight through the porch of his beloved. Ruth Moreland, dusk-eyed heiress to a name smirched by her sire’s allegiance to hill-country reaper Ian Sanford, stands at the crossroads where moonshine kisses hemlock. When a dirt farmer is bled white and left as crow-bait, the trail’s only breadcrumb is a tobacco pouch stitched with the Moreland crest; hours later, a bank watchman lies crumpled, a skein of flaxen hair soldered to his rigor fist. Orders crackle across the wire—Go get your man—and Jack spurs forth, heart buckling beneath tin star. Each clue is a burr under the skin: a spurred heel-print outside Ruth’s window, a cameo earring in the sawdust of Arnold Davis’s roadhouse, the sulfur stench of a recently fired Colt. Duty impels Jack to clap irons on the girl whose name he has whispered into canteen steam; bail is posted by Davis, gargoyle proprietor of The Coal Pit, where Sanford’s brood toast chaos. Inside that cedar-smoked tavern, loyalties combust: Davis lunges at Ruth, Sandy—half-wolf, half-saint—intercedes, a chair leg splinters, a horse screams, and sixty khaki-clad phantoms gallop out of the fog like avenging Furies. In the iron-gray dawn, every brigand is netted save Sanford, who retreats to a cabin already kissed by kerosene and vengeance. Before the timbers collapse into ember, Ruth’s innocence is etched in firelight and gunpowder, Jack’s badge is both crucifix and covenant, and the horizon rewrites itself in ash and absolution.
Synopsis
Jack, stalwart trooper 44, is in love with Ruth Moreland, the daughter of a member of a band of outlaws headed by Ian Sanford, a desperado, who has long terrorized the hills. A farmer is held up, robbed and left for dead by the gang. Jack is assigned to the case by Captain Adams, of Troop A, and is told in the curt language of the famous mounted state troopers of Pennsylvania, "Go and get your man." To Jack's consternation the clew he obtains appears to lead to the Moreland home. At almost the same time a bank watchman is murdered, and Jack is also assigned to this mystery. The first thing he discovers is a lock of blonde hair clutched in the dead man's hand. Jack, steeled by his sense of duty, is compelled to arrest the girl he loves on a charge of complicity, if not of actual participation in the murder. Ruth is allowed out of prison on bail furnished by Arnold Davis, the proprietor of a roadhouse of unsavory reputation, which is the headquarters of Sanford's gang. Davis attacks Ruth and is in return assailed by Sandy, a member of Sanford's gang. Following a fight, Sandy rides for aid. Sixty state troopers ride to round up the entire band, fight enormous odds, and finally arrest every man and woman in "The Coal Pit" tavern. Later, before her burning cabin, Ruth is vindicated by...but see the photoplay to realize just what a startling climax of dramatic power this situation leads up to.
