The Border Legion
1916
She tracked him into a lawless land where men died without mercy and love meant choosing between salvation and destruction. Joan Randle doesn't hesitate when her fiancé Jim Cleve rides toward the border, bitter and reckless after their argument. She's heard the stories: the Border Legion, Jack Kells and his killers, robbing helpless prospectors in the dead of night. She knows what Jim could become if she doesn't reach him first. What she doesn't expect is to find herself in Kells's camp, a captive of the very outlaws she's tracking, or to discover that one of the gang rides secret for the law. The wilderness strips away everything comfortable and familiar. Joan must decide what she really wants: the man Jim could be, or the man he's becoming. Grey paints the Southwest in brutal, gorgeous strokes, where loyalty is tested in gunfights and love means walking into danger with your eyes open.
Editions
X-Ray
“She sensed in him loneliness, hunger for the sound of a voice. She had heard her uncle speak of the loneliness of lonely camp-fires and how all men working or hiding or lost in the wilderness would see sweet faces in the embers and be haunted by soft voices.””
— Zane Grey
“A bandit, then, in the details of his life, the schemes, troubles, friendships, relations, was no different from any other kind of a man. He was human, and things that might constitute black evil for observers were dear to him, a part of him.””
— Zane Grey
“Joan felt that she would always be haunted and would always suffer that pang for Kells. She would never lie down in the peace and quiet of her home, wherever that might be, without picturing Kells, dark and forbidding and burdened, pacing some lonely cabin or riding a lonely trail or lying with his brooding face upturned to the lonely stars. Sooner or later he would meet his doom. It was inevitable. She pictured over that sinister scene of the dangling forms; but no”
— Zane Grey
“She had grown now not to blame any man, honest miner or bloody bandit. She blamed only gold. She doubted its value. She could not see it a blessing. She absolutely knew its driving power to change the souls of men. Could she ever forget that vast ant-hill of toiling diggers and washers, blind and deaf and dumb to all save gold?””
— Zane Grey
