We sometimes tend to think of the old pulps as publications specializing in one kind of fiction or other—detective fiction, or westerns, or horror, or sci-fi. This is true enough; there were, however, also a lot of magazines like New Story that published a wide variety of different genres. They are fun to look at now because they provide a more panoramic view of what the fiction market was like at the time.
I’ve not been able to learn much about Charles Wesley Sanders (if you have information on him, please email me and share it!). I know that he wrote mostly western stories and novels, and that his career ran from basically the 1910s until the 1930s. He was the author of a number of westerns, and he had one screenplay credit to his name (a mystery from 1918 called $5,000 Reward). “The Law of the Wood” is not a Western, but rather a mysterious tale set in a winter lumber camp in the Michigan wilderness, published in New Story in July 1914.