THE MAN WHO BELIEVED IN THE CODE OF THE WEST

Thaddeus Baldwin, an orphaned Easterner from Harvard, follows his father's advice and carries the gentlemanly Cambridge tone to far Montana where he sets up ranching. Hardly settled, he becomes the town's laughing stock when he decides to put up curtains on his ranch house windows What's more, the reigning cattle thief, Hurd, takes a dislike to Baldy's hifalutin Harvardese, knocks him out and later challenges him to a showdown. Lousy with a six-gun but a dead shot with a rifle, Baldwin kills a Hurd cohort and disarms the leader. Later, Hurd takes to shooting up Baldwin's ranch nightly and burns his barn. But when he arrives with dynamite to blow up the hero and his girlfriend, he finds he has come to his own funeral at the hands of the Harvard fury. The story lopes along with few surprises, and Baldy's prolixities fail to strike the richer tones of the Western tradition of burlesque rhetoric.