Falcon, of Squawtooth — A Reader’s Guide

Dialogue as Social Marker

The brakeman’s questions—'Where you goin’, Jack?' 'What d’ye follow?'—are clipped and functional, yet they reveal a hierarchy. The tramp answers without deference: 'West.' 'I’m broke.' 'Railroad-construction work.' Hankins avoids dialect spelling but captures cadence through contractions and dropped g’s. The exchange ends with the brakeman’s 'Humph!' and a door slammed 'viciously.' The tramp’s parting 'So long!' is casual, unbothered. The author uses dialogue to show class friction without editorializing.

Description of Movement and Restraint

Hankins describes the tramp’s exit with economy: 'sat down in the door, dangled his feet, and dropped lightly to the ground.' The verbs are plain, the sentence short. Later, Manzanita rides with 'the pinto covered with sweat and foam,' and the narrative notes her 'unquestioning devotion' in a detached, almost aphoristic aside: 'Blind justice for men—blind love for women!' The authorial voice intrudes rarely, but when it does, it generalizes emotion into a maxim, a technique that distances the reader from the character’s interiority.

Recurring Objects and Their Weight

A pink necktie appears as a damning piece of evidence—'all in a string.' The object is not described beyond its color and condition, yet it drives the plot. Similarly, a 'pasteboard cover' found by man hunters becomes a token of suspicion. Hankins invests ordinary items with narrative significance: a saddle is 'silver-mounted,' a mare is 'fiery' and 'little.' These details are functional, not decorative. The tie, the cover, the saddle—each carries the story forward without symbolic inflation.

Narrative Voice and Point of View

The third-person narration stays close to Manzanita in the later excerpt, filtering events through her urgency: 'She had not stopped to reason.' Yet the narrator steps back to comment on 'the makers of our laws' and 'womanlike' behavior. This oscillation between immersion and commentary gives the prose a slightly old-fashioned, omniscient quality. Hankins also uses direct address to the reader sparingly—the aside about wives and husbands is the most notable instance. The effect is a narrative that observes its characters with sympathy but also with a knowing, almost editorial distance.

Readers attentive to Hankins’s craft will notice how he builds tension through concrete objects and terse dialogue rather than psychological depth. The pink necktie, the pasteboard cover, the silver-mounted saddle—these are the hinges of the plot. The author’s voice, when it steps forward, offers maxims rather than judgments. Approach the novel as a study in how a writer of the 1920s Western used material detail and spoken word to construct character and conflict.

Reading Hankins’s Falcon, I keep thinking about how few writers manage that dry, desert-honest dialogue anymore. It reminds me of the first time I sat with The mark of Zorro — A Reader’s Guide, puzzling over why the old stories still felt so present. Maybe the silence between the words is what lingers longest.