The West Wind Author:Cyrus Townsend Brady Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE RANCHMAN, THE GIRL AND THE SOLDIER BIG Patrick Sullivan had no premonition as to what awaited him at the ranch house as he leisurely rode ... more »upward to the top of the hill about ten o'clock that bright summer morning. His name stamped him as Irish, his disposition, bearing and temper, especially the last, were undoubtedly Celtic. And his facial appearance, his dark hair, fair skin and brilliant blue eyes could only have come from the Emerald Isle. But his Irish heritage was one of the distant past. It showed the persistency of his racial stock, by the way. For well nigh two hundred years his people had been denizens of Pennsylvania and the further West. The family had been a useful one to the United States. Its sons had filled positions of prominence in their day, in the army and navy in the several wars of the country, being all of them natural fighters, of course, and one of them had even risen to be a member of Congress from his native state, when it meant much more to be a member of that exalted body than it does now. There had been a roving strain through them all, however, which had broken the trammels of convention at intervals, and had sent the particular scion of the house in whose veins the strain ran most swiftly, careering all over the world on all sorts of quests, aimless or otherwise, but always out-of-the-way. This vagrom disposition had brought Patrick, or "Big Pat," as he was called by every cowboy under him, to the ranch in the foothills of the Big Horn Range. There a power stronger even than the wanderlust had constrained him to plant his stakes permanently on the spot in which he is now to be found. Sullivan was a man of herculean strength and gigantic build. He could ride anything that was big enough for him to ride and that could carr...« less