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Steele, Blue. Blue Steele was created by “Tom Gunn,” the pseudonym of Syl MacDowell (Swap Bootle, Biff Quade), and appeared in 102 stories in a variety of pulps and at least five short story collections and novels from 1934 to 1954, beginning with “The Sheriff of Painted Post” (Popular Western, Nov. 1934).

Blue Steele is the Sheriff of Sawtooth, Painted Post, Indian County.

His past was cloaked in a silence that was never broken. Steele was an enigma that Painted Post long since had quit trying to solve.

He had reached the raw little cowtown at the peak of a rustler war, in time to see the first sheriff shot down in the jail office doorway. Nobody else in Indian County dared take that job.

The bronzed young stranger with the six o’clock figure of a tireless rider had stepped into authority, cleaned out the Robles crowd and established law along the Border. He had become a classic legend, the most famous lawman in the Territory.

He still forked the high-bred steel gelding that had brought him out of nowhere. He still dealt lightning justice with a pair of white-butted Colts. His one crony and greatest admirer from the beginning was a red-headed young puncher, named Shorty Watts, who became his segundo or deputy.

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