Lauran Paine

"Ben Albright has successfully made five cattle drives from Texas to Kansas, but this spring will be his most difficult. With the death of Ewell Lansing, Northerners have taken over his trading post and ferry and refused provisions or passage to Texas cattle drives, but Albright will not turn back or change his traditional course"--

"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..."--Back...

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 his friend Frank McCoy that if he looked out a window and saw a building less than...

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...

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...

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...

"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 Walt had...

Kit Butler and Lige Turner are weathered trackers-trappers who once lived among the Dakota people as brothers, learning their language, their land, and their way of life. Now, with the fur trade dwindling, they find themselves guides for a wagon train-a group of emigrants leaving behind the comforts of the world they know for the Wild West. The problem is, they have to pass through hostile Dakota Indian territory to reach their destination.The members...

"The cattlemen believed in free graze for their herds and that meant that others must be forced to leave the territory. When the sheep ranchers refused, night riders shot and killed a sheep rancher and a shepherd as proof that the edict to leave was serious.Uriah Gorman -- an old confederate soldier-- refuses to be intimidated. With a goal of justice for the sheep ranchers, Gorman becomes their leader. His strategy is to hit the cattle ranchers harder...

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...