Mr. Scraggs

At the Ellis ranch, Ezekiel George Washington Scraggs sighs so deeply the cowhands can feel the draft across the bull-pen. Then he tops every tale of hardship with a single revelation: “I have been a Mormon.”

In the spring-sunned Bad Lands, among ranch hands who can debate anything for a month, Red Saunders tells how the mournful newcomer turned their contests in misery upside down. Scraggs works hard, keeps his sorrows close, and carries a past crowded with wives, ambition and the kind of domestic trouble that has left him bald, nervous and short on faith in nearly everything. The cowboys thought they knew misfortune—until Scraggs began to talk. What could possibly make a man like him loosen up and smile?

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