The Cold Trail

When Jim Randall returned to Briscoe, the little range town of his childhood, in response to a note that his father had suddenly died, he was met with a strange and hostile silence. No one cared to explain until Lewis Dunham, once his father's friend, told Jim that his father was an embezzler and a suicide. 'People will hold your father's actions against you, Jim,' Dunham said. 'You'd better clear out and try to make a start elsewhere.' But Jim refused to leave, and each day the doubt in his mind grew. Little pieces of evidence, here and there strengthened his conviction that his father was not a suicide, that he was not an embezzler. And soon he discovered that his attempts to establish his father's innocence were resented-so viciously that he too was marked for death.