When Lorrimer Weldon rode into San Trinidad, he found he immediately had two job offers: the outlaw Roger Cunningham wants Weldon to join his smuggling operation as a hired gun, and Dr. Henry Watts wants to hire Weldon's gun as well, but as muscle to protect a patient dying of consumption, the beautiful Helen O'Mallock. Weldon finds Watts' proposition far more attractive, so he accepts the offer, knowing that Cunningham will resent the decision.

After hitting a rich vein of gold on the back of Champion Mountain, Blondy Kitchin heads to the big city to have a good time, but there his luck runs out and he ends up spending two years in prison. The prison's chaplain helps educate him, smooth out his rough edges, and convinces him that the range is the place for Kitchin to make use of his brute strength and free spirit.

After 10 years of wandering, during which he has lived the life of a gambler and learned the ways of devious men, Tom Keene returns home, only to find his father alone and dying. Old John Keene’s sole legacy to his son is a Bible, so with his father’s passing, Tom Keene renounces his selfish, worthless past and sets out to preach to others that the greatest happiness is born of trust in one another.

This bundle features “The Danger Lover” and the title story, in which 22-year-old Lewis Dikkon has led a sheltered life, working seven days a week as a shoemaker for his taskmaster uncle, Charles Bender. Being inside most of the time, he knows little of the town and its inhabitants. A stranger named Sam Prentiss begins showing up at 8 p.m. every Saturday night to sit in a chair in the shop’s doorway and look across the street for an hour. Their conversations, though limited, begin to set Dikkon’s mind to work and before long he decides he wants to buy a gun.

Alfred Larribee is sent by his father to live with his cousin’s family in the West. Larribee proves to be lazy and shiftless…spending most of his time in town…drinking and gambling…even cheating at cards. What changes all this is the appearance of Sky Blue…a magnificent stallion that has never been ridden. Dan Gurry is the owner and hopes to find a cowboy who can ride Sky Blue…but the first one to try is seriously injured. After that no one is willing to volunteer to try again except Larribee.

This Raging Bull Publishing box set contains four classic Western books by Max Brand: Black Jack, Harrigan, Riders of the Silence, and The Untamed.

Peter Quince was a fighter born and bred. Orphaned at a young age, he remembered an old woman saying that he was a bad one and would cause a lot of trouble in the world. Others claimed he had bad blood, and it would show up sooner or later. But Bill Andrews felt a connection with the boy, took him home, and raised him as one of his own despite his wife's misgivings. Peter soon learned he could manipulate people by withholding his true feelings. He had learned that battles should be won by cunning and strength, with cunning being far more important.

He was still a young man, but he'd used that handful of years effectively, building a bad reputation that spanned the West, his villainy taking different forms everywhere it took roost. Denver knew him as the Doctor; Texans called him Montana; and folks in Idaho called him Texas. On account of his youth, most everywhere else called him the Lonesome Kid.

The attacks of the huge lobo Gray Cloud have caused the remarkable price of $2,500 to be put on his head. And it falls to big Dave Reagan, considered little better than a half-wit in that part of the range, to discover the monster held fast in two of his traps. Something in the fearless animal's eyes keeps young Dave from killing the wolf. Instead Dave releases Gray Cloud, who is unable to walk, and rescues him from a prairie fire that threatens them both. Dave brings Gray Cloud home and chains him in a shed that he uses as a blacksmith shop.

Peter Dunstan is a big rancher who wants to become bigger, to control more land. So when he buys Dr. Henry Morgan's ranchland that has been unsuccessfully converted to farming, it is his intention to return it to open range. The only stipulation the doctor makes is that Dunstan must retain Sandy Sweyn, who has more or less been Dr. Morgan's ward. Though the man is of age, he is generally considered a half-wit, even by the doctor. Still, Sandy has a fabulous gift: He can communicate with animals.

Harry Destry was a rough-and-tumble fighter who never lost a battle. But after six years in jail for a robbery he didn't commit, he comes back a changed man. The townsfolk believe he's beaten. They think all the fight's gone right out of him. And that's exactly what Destry wants them to think....

Louis L'Amour was the most decorated author in the history of American letters and a recipient of the Medal of Freedom. Now collected here in a single book are several of Louis L'Amour's finest Western stories the way Mr. L'Amour wrote them. At the time Louis L'Amour was writing, it was common practice for editors to rewrite the manuscript to fit certain publishing criteria. The text of The Strong Land has been restored, and the stories within it appear as Mr. L'Amour intended.

He left the West at the age of seventeen, leaving behind a rootless past and a bloody trail of violence. In the East he became one of the wealthiest financiers in America—and one of the most feared and hated. Now, suffering from incurable cancer, he has come back to New Mexico to die alone. But when an all-out range war erupts, Flint chooses to help Nancy Kerrigan, a local rancher. A cold-eyed speculator is setting up the land swindle of a lifetime, and Buckdun, a notorious assassin, is there to back his play.

“If a man won’t fight for what is rightly his, then he ain’t much account.” With this challenge from his dying father, young Shell Tucker rode out after three men who had stolen the twenty thousand dollars his father was carrying. Two of the men he hunted, Doc Sites and Kid Reese, were his friends. Dreaming of adventure, Tucker had wanted to join their gang. But now, with his father gone and the people back home desperately in need of the proceeds from the cattle drive, Shell was determined to uphold his father’s reputation and recover their money.

Tap Duvarney lost his innocence in the War Between the States and then put his skills to the test as a soldier in the frontier army. Now, leaving behind a devoted fiancée, he is trying to make his fortune on the Texas coast, working a ranch as the partner of his old friend Tom Kittery - and finding himself in the middle of a feud between Kittery and the neighboring Munson family.

Harry Destry was a rough-and-tumble fighter who never lost a battle. But after six years in jail for a robbery he didn't commit, he comes back a changed man. The townsfolk believe he's beaten. They think all the fight's gone right out of him. And that's exactly what Destry wants them to think....

Here are 10 unabridged stories by the greatest American authors. These treasured stories from the most influential authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries were selected for their literary importance as well as their dramatic oral qualities.

Chancy Gantry and Ollie Teal are honest cowpunchers, riding herd on 1,500 longhorns from Texas to Kansas. Their trail boss, Lucas Stout, is tough but fair. He’s never lost a hand on a drive and doesn’t aim to start now. So when a cowhand needs a sawbones badly, Stout sends Chancy and Ollie to escort the man to a town called Prosperity, of which neither of them has ever heard. At first glance, the town looks deserted - but the saloon is full. Chancy and Ollie are about to discover that some towns are a lot easier to ride into than to ride out of....

One ranch. Three sons. Only one will inherit...and on one condition. Tired of waiting for his sons to settle down, Arizona-territory rancher Angus McKettrick announces a competition: the first son to marry and produce a grandchild will inherit Triple M ranch. Now, three distinctly different, equally determined cowboys are searching high and low for brides.

The literary legacy of USA Today best-selling author and Medicine Pipe Bearer Award nominee Ralph Compton lives on in Ride the Hard Trail. Hiding from the law, brothers Lin and Chancy Bryce hire on as cowpunchers at a widow’s ranch. But soon they’re embroiled in a range war with a nefarious cattle baron who has a small army of hired guns protecting his interests.

In this romantic and raw adventure set in the untamed wilderness of Wyoming of 1886, an anonymous college graduate ventures out west where he encounters gun fights, lynching, cattle rustlers, high-stake poker games, Indian attacks, and a brave, honest and imposing cowboy known simply as the Virginian. Presented as the archetypal, ideal hero of the "western" genre (which was novelized for the very first time in this same book), the Virginian, a foreman at Shiloh Ranch, carries a strong sense of justice.

The Lindsay family has come west hoping to help the father, John, recover from an illness. When they arrive, they are induced to purchase Spanish Peaks Ranch, an abandoned United States military post surrounded by mountains. It seems like a perfect place to settle into their new life as ranchers. As they soon find out, though, this deserted fort is equally suited for both protection and imprisonment.

Waylaid by a pack of murdering outlaws, Daniel Strange's lifeless body is left dangling at the end of a rope. Now, a mysterious gunslinger is on the vengeance trail, packing Strange's trademark twin Colts, and answering to the same name. With fiery green eyes and a temper to match, he won't stop until every last man who killed Strange shares the same fate. And as each bullet finds its mark, his victims will die never knowing the truth: that Daniel Strange may be dead and buried, but his daughter is alive - and killing....

Busted out of prison by an outlaw friend, Flintlock joins a hunt for a fortune - a golden bell hanging in a remote monastery. But between the smouldering ruin of his former jail cell and a treasure in the Arizona mountains there will be blood at a U.S. Army fort, a horrifying brush with Apache warriors, and a dozen bloody showdowns with the schemers, shootists, madmen, and lost women who find their way to Flintlock's side.

In 1876 the seemingly impossible happened in San Antonio, Texas - Emmett Strong, a prodigy of a pistolero, accidentally shot his own young wife in a showdown gone awry. Five years later, death again visits Emmett's family, and now - want to or not - he's going to have to overcome his reluctance to draw his six-gun if he's to catch and bring to justice the crazed gunman who murdered his brother.

Hot-blooded Georgiana Stockwell will break a man's heart while he's eating out of her hand. Moving from the East to join her schoolteacher sister in the rugged wilds of Tonto Basin, Arizona, Georgiana makes quite an impression. Despite her sister's best efforts, Georgiana creates a culture clash as her modern, free-spirited personality comes up against the code of the West, the unwritten law of the range that everyone is expected to follow.

St. Louis in 1880 is full of ghosts - mangled soldiers, tortured slaves, the innocent victims of war - and Jacob Tracy can see them all. Ever since Antietam, when he lay delirious among the dead and dying, Trace has been haunted by the country's restless spirits. The curse cost him his family, his calling to the church, and damn near his sanity. He stays out of ghost-populated cities as much as possible these days, guiding wagon trains west with his pragmatic and skeptical partner, Boz.

A Penguin Classic. First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themselves in the world, these stories reflect Steinbeck’s characteristic interests: The tensions between town and country, laborers and owners, past and present.

Mauled by a giant grizzly and left to die, 16 year-old Jose Olano's chances for life were remote. Then, like a guardian angel, came Robert "Gray Eagle" McAllister, one-time army scout and sometime outlaw. In his flight to escape a posse, he finds the brutalized body of Jose. Knowing his decision to help Jose may mean his own death, he stays and brings Jose back from the brink of death. Thus began one of the greatest companionships ever known to the Idaho frontier.

Phil Sundeen thinks Deputy Sheriff Kirby Frye is just a green local kid with a tin badge. And when the wealthy cattle baron's men drag two prisoners from Frye's jail and hang them from a high tree, there's nothing the young lawman can do about it. But Kirby's got more grit than Sundeen and his hired muscle bargained for. They can beat the boy and humiliate him, but they can't make him forget the oath he has sworn to uphold.