Set in early 1900s Oregon, the last gasp of the American frontier, Honey in the Horn is the story of Clay, a 17-year-old who was orphaned at a young age and brought up rough. A young man with a chip on his shoulder the size of Mt. Rainer, at the opening of the book he is working as a shepherd in the hill country, running sheep for old Preston Shively, a now elderly and crotchety example of one the territory’s first settlers. Clay has a fair bit of history with the Shively family — shortly before his mother’s death, she took up with one of the Shively brothers, Old Preston’s no-good sons, and Clay stayed with them for a while after she passed.
Though Clay’s been out on his own for years, he’s soon to discover that his old ties can’t be so easily shaken off. At the start of the book, one of the brothers, Wade, has been on the lam in the back country for months, wanted for murder of his brother in a drunken brawl. When an old prospector turns up dead — and his $800 in gambling winnings missing — Wade is the prime suspect, and when he’s arrested the local sheriff insists that Clay come visit him in jail in order to see if he can tempt Wade into confessing where he stashed the loot.
That’s when things get interesting, because just before the sheriff hauls him off, Old Preston Shively hands Clay a gun, insisting that he slip it to Wade during his visit. The gun is unloaded; both Clay and Preston figure that Wade’s certain to attempt a jailbreak and get himself killed. And that’s exactly what Preston wants. Torn and uncertain, Clay lets himself be bullied into participating in the scheme, taking off with Wade’s horse and high-tailing it for the back country until the jailbreak and its aftermath have blown over.
Clay figures he’ll have to hide out for a few weeks; soon he gets news from a fellow runaway and former ward of Preston’s, an Indian boy, that his plan has gone awry. Wade tried to break jail, alright — but he succeeded, and now Clay himself is wanted for aiding a fugitive. Clay and the Indian boy decide to cross over the mountains before winter sets in a find work on the coast; they set off together, but after only a day or two, go their separate ways. Partly this is because the two boys don’t get along too well — but mostly it’s because of another of Clay’s encounters during their journey, with a horse trader and his family.
The horse trader is also headed for the coast, traveling with his common-law wife and his beautiful daughter, Luce, who’s around Clay’s age. Clay’s seen them around before and been struck by Luce’s beauty, and now, with few other prospects, decides to travel with them, in the hope of winning Luce’s heart. (Not that any phrase so sentimental as “winning Luce’s heart” would pass within a mile of the cantankerous Davis’ prose.)
At first they bond, and then they bicker. Clay hides the real reason for running away, and he’s convinced Luce is hiding secrets from him, too. A fight over who ought to trust who splits them apart, and Clay is briefly tempted to hook up with another woman. But a sighting of some sheriff’s men drives him back out on the road, and when horse trader catches up to him, he and Luce come to an understanding. They pass the winter together by themselves in a cabin on the shore of the Pacific, hunting, tending the horses, and playing house, and when the spring comes Luce and Clay decide to break out on their own, leaving her father behind and joining a wagon train of settlers headed for the interior.
While on the wagon train, they encounter Wade Shively again, and Clay’s attempt to keep Luce from harm — and from learning of his secret — culminate in a murder, a cover-up and a lynching. Shortly thereafter, Luce becomes pregnant and miscarries, running away from Clay whom she blames for abandoning her during her illness.
Refusing to chase after her, Clay wanders the west, passing eight or nine months working a series of temporary jobs, including hop-bagger and riverboat mate before fetching up as a hay harvester at a remote prairie outpost, where he encounters both Luce and the Indian boy again, and yet another gambling debt gone bad results in another murder, and the prompting book’s climactic confrontation and confession.
A description of Honey’s plot reveals it to be pure melodrama, but Davis as a stylist is allergic to glamor, and skeptical of passion. Though the story takes place in a beautiful landscape, it’s populated with grubby and cynical characters. Davis employs the long, rambling travelogue passages which take up much of the book to give a warts-n-all take on the character of the hardy frontier settlers who broke the west, with damn near everyone Clay encounters revealed to be venal and petty, their characters twisted by isolation, fuzzing the brains of some while turning other into petty autocrats, and making most careless of justice and the value of human life, beaten down by nature and ever-questing (and ruthless in their quest) for the big score that will allow them to attain comfort.
