Wild Horse Mesa

Tim Holt's father, Jack Holt, starred in a 1925 version of Zane Greys's "Wild Horse Mesa" for Famous Players/Paramount, but the shuffling of plots and character names that Hollywood did to the works of Zane Grey closely resembles a game of "52 Pick-up", so the word version is a more apt description than remake reference the Tim Holt film. The elder Holt's film did involve wild horses and he (as Chayne Weyner) and George Magrill (as Bent Mererube) did get into a wrangle over barbed wire, but that is about the end of the similarities beyond the name of Zane Grey and the titles. This version has Dave Jordon and his Irish-American pal, Chito Rafferty, on a wild horse hunt with Pop Melhern and his daughter Sue, where they win a gun battle against Jim Horn and his rustlers working for a shady horse dealer, Olmstead. Dave finds Hod Slack, one of Pop's riders, using barbed wire to trap a horse, and fires him. Horn arranges a sale of Pop's horses to Olmstead, but Pop is killed by Olmstead before he can get home with the money. Dave gets suspicious when Olmstead demands the horses, and he and Chito start a search when Pop's riderless horse appears. They find his body in the desert and, near it, an identifying seal from a pistol butt. Dave rides to town to check the guns of Olmsteads men, and he demands to see Olmstead's gun when he appears with Marshal Bradford. Olmstead denies owning a gun. Dave breaks into Olmstead's office, overpowers him, and finds the murder weapon, but leaves to await the return of the Marshal. Slack, who has blackmailed himself into a partnership with Olmstead, sneaks into the office and, on the pretext of helping him, gets Olmstead to open his safe. Slack kills Olmstead and takes the money stolen from Pop. The Marshal charges Dave with the killing and jails him. With Dave in jail, Slack and his henchies ride out to steal the horses.