The Finding of Jasper Holt

A girl travelling west alone to her married sister is carried through danger on the plains by a stranger, and the man who saves her life turns out to be Jasper Holt — whom her brother-in-law calls a coward and treats as an enemy. Then she overhears her brother-in-law plotting to cheat Holt out of his water rights, and has to choose between her family and the man she has promised to trust. Grace Livingston Hill wrote more than a hundred novels for a devoted readership, and her West here is irrigation contracts and small-town talk as much as open range. Fifty-seven plates of nineteenth-century landscape painting, among them works by Winslow Homer and Albert Bierstadt, give the novel's plains and mountains a visual counterpart in the American scenery of 1842 to 1894.