A lone gunman dragging his own coffin behind him joins downtrodden townspeople to battle a sadistic colonel with his band of religious fanatics.

The fifty empty freights danced and rolled and rattled on the rough roadbed and filled Jericho Pass with thunder, the big engine was laboring and grunting at the grade, but five cars back the noise of the locomotive was lost. Yet there is a way to talk above the noise of a freight train just as there is a way to whistle into the teeth of a stiff wind. This freight-car talk is pitched just above the ordinary tone-it is an overtone of conversation,...

Dick Rutherford, known simply as the Colonel, had set out into the West to find his fortune, accompanied only by his young companion, Christy Deever. But it looked like the frontier would provide more danger than money...until the Colonel and Christy met Stone-That-Shines, a Mandan warrior who possessed a medicine stone that gave him his name. As soon as the Colonel got a close look at the medicine stone, he knew immediately what made it shine a rich...

A Crow Indian, two Mexican bandits, a libidinous preacher, and a Pinkerton agent join St. John's posse to bring in an imaginative con artist who has done his best to scam the entire breadth of the Old West.

Out on the frontier, there are two kinds of men. There's the kind who's tough with a gun in his hand, who preys on anyone or anything weaker than himself. And then there's the kind like Stillwater Smith. Long and lean, Stillwater's a grizzled Civil War veteran. He doesn't take easily to killing, but he's always ready to fight for what he believes in. And you can only push him so far, as Asa Wheeler, wealthy cattle rancher, is about to find out. Wheeler's...

Louis L'Amour said that the West was no place for the frightened or the mean. It was a "big country needing big men and women to live in it." This volume presents nine of L'Amour's ever-popular short stories-history that lives forever. In "Riding for the Brand," Jed Asbury comes across a derelict covered wagon-the people and their horses killed-and decides to finish what the former owners had set out to do. In "Four Card Draw," Allen Ring wins a small...

From the moment Abner Dent spotted Eve in a Maiden dance hall, he knew he wanted her for his wife. He promised her everything and kept his word. But suddenly--so it seemed to Abner--everything was falling into ruin. When it seemed as if nothing worse coul

Cripple Creek, Colorado is the most infamous sinkhole of vice and violence in the Rockies. The town's steamy bordello row and gambling halls beckon to Brad Medford who is set on tasting all the pleasures a young man can find. He sets out across the long miles to reach Cripple Creek and prove himself a man, but misfortune takes a hand when Brad's path crosses that of a renowned gunfighter. It turns out Brad's first meal in Cripple Creek may be his...

Hard Trail to Follow is the seventh novel in Elmer Kelton's acclaimed "Texas Ranger" series from Elmer Kelton Former Texas Ranger Andy Pickard, called "Badger Boy" when he lived with Comanches as a child, is following the plow on West Texas land until he learns that his friend, Sheriff Tom Blessing, has been killed during a jailbreak. The escaped bank robbers are led by a man calling himself Cordell. Andy gets reinstated as a Ranger so he can catch...