Lauran Paine
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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...
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Samuel Patton lost his wife to lung fever two years ago. Now, suffering from lung fever himself and closer to eternity every day, he is traveling south through the mountains with his small son and daughter, hoping somewhere in this savage land he can find a good home for them before time runs out. When the two kids find an unconscious man, the three tend to his wounds, care for his horse, and load him into their wagon. Samuel finds a cache of money...
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It was spring on the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains of Texas, the time for the cattle drives to push north to the rail heads in Kansas. The "Lost Cause" of the South was still fresh in the mind of Southerners, including fifty-five-year-old Ben Albright, a pioneer of the Texas cattle drives, who was well familiar with the trail and its dangers-he had successfully made five cattle drives from Texas to Kansas, but this spring will be his most difficult....
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Forced to take a precipitous route off the rimrocks and down into an unknown valley to escape certain death by four men pursuing him, Pete Knight, a cowhand seeking a job, sees a town ahead in the distance. If he can just make it to that town, he believes he will be safe. Little does he know that he is heading into Gunsight, Wyoming, where a long-standing feud between the townsmen and the range men has reached the boiling point.
Arthur Hobart owner...
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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 killed...
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Two tales of action, adventure, and the Wild West from a founding master of the genre, Lauran Paine.
In "The Crescent Scar," one man trying his best to stay on the straight and narrow is Sadler Carrel. Once upon a time he was a notorious outlaw known as the Gila River Kid, but he left his violent past behind to work a cattle ranch, always careful to keep the crescent-shaped scar, the only known identifying mark from his former life, carefully covered.
But...
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The trouble began for Sheriff Claude Rainey when the Hightower Ranch cowboys discovered a mummified man and his horse in a desert canyon near Springville, Arizona-both shot in the head. Ordinarily that should have been the end of it. Few men riding the outlaw trail up out of Mexico make it through that godforsaken country. What troubled Rainey and the townsmen, however, was what Hightower foreman Al Trail had brought into town and given to the sheriff.
Near...
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Deadwood, Dakota Territory, was filled with luckless miners and diggers, as well as more than its share of lawlessness, and more often than not, there was nothing Marshal Fred Nolan and his two deputy marshals, Wentworth and Grubb, could do. So when a teen hustler, known as Gitalong because of his crippled leg, was hoorawed by a trio of Texas drovers, the law wasn't called in. Besides, two strangers had come to Gitalong's aid, confronting the drovers...
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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....
10) Cheyenne Pass
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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. Luckily,...
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Walt Hodge had delivered eighty horses to Whipple Barracks for the Army and he wasn't in a big hurry to get home. He traveled down the Saginaw Mountains and into the upland cow country of Sunflower, Arizona, seeking only a cold glass of beer, food, and a bed for himself, along with feed for his horse. He should have listened and turned around when he asked the hostler what was going on and was told: "Trouble, mister. Bad trouble." After he had a drink,...
12) Open Range
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Boss Spearman knows that times are changing on the open range for free-grazing cattlemen who don't own land. But more and more settlers are staking claim to the land, and when a local rancher kills one of Boss's crew, he knows he must make a stand.
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Caleb Doorn is better known by his Blackfoot name, Many Coups. Doorn is scouting for the U.S. Army in the Mexican campaign when a small wagon train passes on its way to California. Their trek will take them into Indian country, and to protect the train from attack, the wagon master has foolishly taken a young Blackfoot woman hostage.