Arizona Ames

by Zane Grey

First published 1932

Amazon

4.2(945)

Arizona Ames is a restless horseman whose travels carry him through Arizona, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado in the closing years of the nineteenth-century West. Again and again he becomes involved in other people’s troubles, using his skill with horses and weapons to protect those who cannot easily protect themselves.

The episodes gradually turn a wandering life into a search for something more permanent. Grey makes long distances, difficult country and isolated settlements central to the action, while Ames’s instinct to intervene brings him into conflicts over loyalty, violence and personal responsibility. Romance eventually offers the possibility that the man who has always moved on might choose to remain.