Lauran Paine

"A feud between the biggest and richest cattleman, Richard DeFore, and the local stage line couldn't have come at a worse time to Winchester, Colorado. The town's new sheriff, John Klinger, young, inexperienced, and hot-headed, hasn't been in the job for a month yet when DeFore, who has never sold or donated the right of way for the pass which is on his land, demands the stage line pay a toll for passage, which the company is refusing to do." -- Page...

Kit Butler and Lige Turner remember the days when they had been welcome at an Indian fire, squatting at a powwow and gorging on half-cooked buffalo hump. But times had changed. Too many whites were moving West and the Indians were embarked on an attempt to throw back the tide. With the fur trade gone, Kit and Lige find themselves guiding a wagon train of thirty wagons with one hundred sixty people -- only seventy-seven were men -- west from Independence,...

Jackson Miggs was a loner who wintered under the Ute Peak in his log cabin. He liked people well enough, but didn't care much for crowds. He even tolerated the cowmen like Hyatt Tolman who used the high meadows around Ute Peak to graze his herd-even when the animals cropped the forage too closely and drove the elk and deer into the higher mountains. Miggs once told Frank McCoy that if he looked out a window and saw a building less than two hundred...

The small town of Ballester owes its prosperity to the confluence of three big ranches-Snowshoe, Mexican Hat, and Rainbow. Its single lawman, Deputy Sheriff Percy Whittaker, known as Perc, didn't have to deal with much lawbreaking other than the occasional drunk on a Saturday night. Until a drifter named Sam Logan rode into town looking for work. The first problem came when a rider from the Snowshoe ranch provoked a gunfight with Logan, and lost....

"The discovery of a man and his horse, both shot dead through the head, with $10,000 buried nearby in a desert canon near Springville, Arizona, lead Sheriff Claude Rainey to believe this is something bigger than a simple bushwhacking"--

Sheriff Doyle Bannion tries to keep the peace in Perdition Wells, Texas, when a shooting claims the life of an innocent bystander.

When a shooting takes place at the Union Eagle Saloon, Dale McAfee, foreman of John Rockland's mighty Texas Star Ranch, kills a range rider working for Clell Durham, a free-graze cowman. It's a fair fight, but it's marked by a tragic accident: the bullet that killed Durham's rider went through his body and also

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Five days ago, the blowing up of the express office safe in Burnt Timbers, Montana, had gone off without a hitch for the four members of the Buck Streeter gang, netting them $28,000. Since then they have taken refuge in an abandoned shack on a plateau above the town of Brigham in northern Wyoming. With its bank and express office across the street from each other and lacking any telegraph for communication, Brigham seems like the perfect place to...