NCW Libraries

"The accidental gunslinger Dooley Monahan has quit wandering and settled down to a farmer's life. But when the itch for adventure gets too strong, he packs up and rides west. Along with his horse General Grant, and Blue, a dog who's too smart for his own good, Dooley rides for the Black Hills to strike it rich in the gold fields of Colorado. But fate has other ideas. When the trigger-happy Dobbs-Queeg gang holds up the Omaha bank, Dooley is mistaken...

"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...

The nephews of Steve Austin, the founder of Texas, must ride into a hostile Mexico to aid a longtime friend in a cattle and horse drive.

Wagon trains heading west were forced to defend themselves against Indians, cope with injuries and illness, and struggle to find food. The group of easterners Rock Bannon was scouting for faced another problem. They were being deceived. When he warned them to remain on the Humboldt Trail, Sharon Crockett and the others refused to listen. Mort Harper, a stranger riding a beautiful black mare, had dazzled them with his charm and good looks. The southern...

"Grey Sage had always wanted to own a homestead and be a real part of the great rangeland but, discouraged with the lonely struggle, he drifted to the annual Stampede at Arapahoe and overnight found himself a champion bronc rider"--

Bandits, outlaws, romance, and adventure abound in Hard Ride, the second-ever collection of tales of the American West from renowned, seven-time Spur Award-winning author Elmer Kelton Each of Elmer Kelton's superb stories of the West showcase the strength and power western spirit. They are filled with marvelous characters--from a rodeo clown who seeks redemption via romance, to an outlaw who comes to the aid of ranchers with no other recourse to justice....

In 1911, veteran army officer C. W. Langhorne accepts a clandestine assignment that will carry him into revolutionary Mexico for the War Department along with the handsome young ladies' man, Lieutenant Calvin Jester. While Langhorne runs afoul of the Acordada, the Mexican secret police organization Jester finds danger of his own enjoying the attentions of both Fabiana Medina, a rich young beauty, and the poor but sincere Luna Garcia while he recovers...

The Santa Fe Ring, a band of ruthless corrupters, has a stranglehold on New Mexico, and are threatening to destroy the growing town of Cimarron. The town looks to Cole Braddock to help them fight back.

Determined to avenge his uncle, Bull Hunter relentlessly tracks down Pete Reeve and, finding the notorious gunfighter in jail, waiting to be hanged for murder, plots to have his own showdown with Reeve.

The story of a town without laws, where hundreds of hungry miners arrive to claim the beef they have paid for, follows these courageous men as they must take justice into their own hands, or prepare themselves to die.