(FORTUNE Magazine) – WESTERN GAS RESOURCES Pity the poor gas industry. Unlike its celebrated sibling Big Oil, it has never had a Rockefeller or a J.R. Ewing to pump up its glamour and clout. Lately it has been tough to make much money selling the stuff. Since the peak in 1984, prices have tumbled 53% because of a gas glut. But Western Gas Resources, a rapidly growing company in Denver, has struck it rich gathering, processing, and marketing the stepsister of fossil fuels. Last year the company raised profits 60% to over $9 million on nearly $256 million in revenues. In the first six months of 1991, while gas prices slumped another 12%, Western's net income rose 47% to a record $8.6 million. Western contracts with oil producers like Exxon, Amoco, and Shell to gather the gas at their reserves. Speed and cost savings have won Western business. When it recently bought a gathering and processing plant near Midland, Texas, it reduced staff from 108 to 45 and cut operating costs in half. Yet it processed 16% more gas. Contracts in hand, Western pumps the gas to one of its 18 processing plants. Scattered from North Dakota to southern Texas, the plants compress and cool the gas. Western then ships it to local distributors, city utilities, and factories that use it to process everything from sugar beets to rubber. Western is the 20-year-old brainchild of CEO Brion Wise. So depressed was the gas market in 1971 that oil producers often burned gas from their wells. This waste spelled opportunity for Wise, then only 25. He and college buddy Ron Richards left their jobs as chemical engineers at Shell Oil, joined with two others, and started the company with $2,400. Richards sold out and now fishes for salmon in Alaska; Wise is still fishing for more gas processing and gathering plants. Western has spent more than $200 million on acquisitions since 1987 and has $40 million more to spend this year.

Stuart Wagner, an analyst at the Denver investment bank Petrie Parkman, thinks earnings will rise 28% in 1992. ''Even in a period of low prices, these guys are doing well,'' he says. ''Think what they can do if prices go up.'' He expects business from new plants to push the stock from a recent $14.63 a share to between $20 and $22 over the next year to 18 months. With prospects like those, who needs J.R.?

RAINBOW TECHNOLOGIES Software pirates, beware! A computer equipped with Rainbow Technologies' device, about the size and shape of a small box of matches, will foil your copying scheme. In fact without the gizmo, you won't get the program to run at all. This Irvine, California, company got its start -- and its name -- in 1985 making a chip for color printers, and later digressed into the software protection field. Rainbow now sells more of these gadgets than any of its competitors -- 1.8 million so far -- to 6,000 software developers, including Microsoft, Intergraph, and Ashton-Tate. Average price: $27. Not bad for a developer trying to protect a program worth more than $500. About a third of the company's customers sell their Rainbow-rigged software in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, where piracy is even more ferocious than in the U.S. and where Rainbow is seeing its most rapid expansion. The stock recently closed at $11.75 a share, 16.3 times the 1991 earnings estimate of R. Mark Matheson, an analyst at Cruttenden & Co. in Irvine, California.

VITAL SIGNS After 17 straight years of earnings growth, Vital Signs still isn't winded. Last year the Totowa, New Jersey, company, which sells disposable breathing products to hospitals, earned nearly $5 million, up 40% from 1989, on sales of $38.5 million. As fear of infectious disease mounts, physicians are switching to products they can toss out. Disposal is less labor intensive and usually cheaper than sterilization. And many doctors prefer the company's clear plastic masks to the reusable black rubber variety that hides the patient's lips. The latest hot sellers from Vital Signs are kits, priced from $13 to $40, that contain everything the anesthesiologist needs to put you under: ^ masks, tubes, the works. When the doctor is through, so is the kit. Glenn Reicin, a health care analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York City, likes the aggressive sales team, more than 100 people who keep ideas flowing for product improvements. The stock recently closed at $15.50 a share, or 23 times earnings. Reicin expects earnings to grow 36% this year and 22% next.

VALUE MERCHANTS The toy industry is in turmoil, but Value Merchants is having a ball. This Milwaukee retailer owns Toy Liquidators, a chain that buys close-out merchandise and sells the goods at as much as 70% off the regular price. Sales at stores that have been open more than a year -- the industry's best barometer of health -- are up over 20% so far in 1991. Value Merchants acquired the other major segment of its business, the Everything's A Dollar chain, in 1989. True to its name, you know exactly how much each piece of costume jewelry, bottle of shampoo, or box of cookies will cost. Both chains have been expanding fast. Together they opened a new store every three days on average this year, topping 300 by early September. Profits rose 38% in 1990 to $6 million on sales of $140 million. Analyst Paul Shain of Robert W. Baird & Co. in Milwaukee projects earnings will jump 44% this year and 35% in 1992. With the stock trading at 13.8 times Shain's 1992 earnings estimate of $1.75 a share, Value Merchants tempts bargain hunters with more than just merchandise.