Under Handicap

'Under Handicap' is a tale of character-building, grit and gumption in the desert of Southwest. Two young men, Tommy Garton and Conniston, struggle to overcome their respective handicaps-the former is disabled while the other lacks tolerance and integrity being the spoilt son of a multi-millionaire father! What is in store for these unusual pair of 'friends' in an unforgiving ranch lifestyle? Will they succeed or lose irrevocably? Excerpt: 'Outside there was shimmering heat and dry, thirsty sand, miles upon miles of it flashing by in a gray, barren blur. A flat, arid, monotonous land, vast, threatening, waterless, treeless. Its immensity awed, its bleakness depressed. Man's work here seemed but to accentuate the puny insignificance of man. Man had come upon the desert and had gone, leaving only a line of telegraph-poles with their glistening wires, two gleaming parallel rails of burning steel to mark his passing.'

Jackson Gregory (1882-1943) was an American teacher, journalist, and writer. He was born in California and was educated at the University of California, Berkeley. He began his career as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco. He later served as a principal at a high school in Truckee. He authored more than 40 fiction novels and a number of short stories. Several of his tales were used as the basis of films released between 1916 and 1944, including The Man from Painted Post. He was one of the America's successful and prolific authors in the first half of the 20th century. Though the vast majority of his stories were about the American Old West, he did occasionally venture into other genres, like mysteries, fantasies or South Seas adventures. His writing formula was usually a successful combination of an abundance of action, adventure and suspense coupled with a dependable story line about areas and the life he was familiar with in the American Southwest.