Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Western" in All Categories

At 35 Federal Marshal Buck Fyffe had 11 years’ experience as a lawman. When he and Deputy Steve Larson were charged with taking the outlaw Luther Gibbs to the newly established Yuma Territorial Prison, he wasn’t expecting any problems. When Larson gets snakebit and dies, Fyffe finds himself almost three days away from the Yuma prison with no one to spell him while he sleeps. It doesn’t take long for Gibbs’s gang, who had been looking for their leader, to find them. The gang hatches a plan for Gibbs to pose as Fyffe and to deliver Fyffe to Yuma prison, claiming he is Gibbs.

All Ben Allison wants in El Paso is to buy a horse. But after the sale falls through, he runs into an old acquaintance and agrees to escort her son home to his father. But Ben is late and misses the stagecoach, and when it's attacked by Apaches, the boy is kidnapped because Ben wasn't there to protect him. Will he be able to fix the mess he never intended to be a part of in the first place?

Walt Hodge had delivered 80 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.”

Deadwood, Dakota Territory, was filled with luckless miners, diggers, and 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 and forcing them to give Gitalong three silver dollars. While it was the most money he'd ever had, he knew it would only bring him trouble.

He was a legend with a blood price on his head both north and south of the border; a renegade black West Point man now living among the hostile bronco Apaches and waging a war of vengeance against two governments. But when a courageous Mestizo priest with a desperate dream needed a man of strength to fulfill his vision, there was only one warrior fierce enough to whom to turn. It was the one they called the Black Apache.

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.

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. But now Jackson's friend Frank McCoy is back from a trip accompanied by beautiful Beverly Shafter and a strange herd of Durham cattle. They moved right into the grazing land that the Tolman herd had been coming to for years. There's going to be trouble....

They sing songs about Matthew Johnson. The hero of dime novels, Matt won national fame during a range war in Idaho when he shot and killed an outlaw - and former saddle pal. But the past 17 years have been an alcoholic blur rather than a heroic journey. Gone are the days when he was a free-wheeling cowboy, swapping poems with his best friend on the cattle ranges. The West has modernized - and practically disappeared - when Matt arrives in Denver in 1894 as the newly appointed US marshal for the state of Colorado.

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.

Noah Benton, a teenager with a great memory, a head for arithmetic, and dreams of excitement, is hired along with his older brother to help drive a herd of Texas longhorns to Abilene, Kansas. But Noah's trail boss happens to be John Wesley Hardin, a notorious killer who thinks Texas lawmen won't look for a fugitive in a crew of hardworking cowboys. After Hardin sees a profit in Noah's ability to count and memorize cards in gambling dens, Noah's dreams of excitement quickly turn into nightmares - for Hardin will kill with little provocation.

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 stage their next robbery before laying low for a while.

What’s a 16-year-old boy to do when he learns that his stepmother and a local judge have murdered his father and now plan to kill him, too? Well, when it’s 1906, and you can play pretty good second base, you join a barn-storming baseball team making its way across Kansas. It also helps that the team is the Kansas City National Bloomer Girls. After all, who’d look for a runaway boy disguised as a girl on a women’s team that competes against town-ball teams of male players? Of course, it’ll take more than long hair, a Spalding glove, and a quick bat to stay alive.

From Spur Award-winning novelist Wayne D. Overholser comes this collection of Western short stories. This collection includes "The Woman from Cougar Creek", "The Price of Pride", "The Devil and Old Man Gillis", "Shooting for a Fall", "It's Hell to Be a Hero", "The Tongue-Tied Cowboy", "From Hell to Leadville", "The Deputy with a Past", "Judge Peterson's Colt Law", "The Breaking of Sam McKay", "Fugitive from the Boothill Brigade", and "The Man Ten Feet Tall".

Ryan Shanley prefers to be called Shan. It's not much, but it helps put some distance between his life during and after serving in the Union army. And he'll put even more distance between the two once he arrives in the Wyoming Territory, where he has a land grant for two square miles. On the stage to Tico, the town nearest his ranch, he meets Sarahlee Gordon. She was only planning to visit Wyoming long enough to sell the cabin she inherited from her uncle. But the attraction between the two becomes obvious on the stage and grows after they arrive.

Adam Rait just wants to guide his crew across the state of Texas, deliver his cargo, and get paid. But his convoy is almost immediately joined by mysterious Mexican travelers - the beautiful and mysterious Angel de Acera and her brother, Bernal. When Kurt Hanover, the man running the deal and Rait's employer is murdered, Rait is left wondering what he should do with an entire wagon train of smuggled arms?

Recently, a number of Western stories have been discovered among Max Brand’s unpublished works and the first story in this book, "The White Streak", is one of them. Its protagonist is 21-year-old Jimmy Babcock, a former football star, but now a worker at the local bank run by William Parker in the town of Dresser, which has changed from cattle country to one made up of oil and alfalfa fields. When Parker fires Jimmy, all Jimmy can think is how he will hurt Muriel Aiken, his fiancée, who wants to marry.

Includes three Max Brand Westerns: The Gift, Jerico's Garrison Finish, and Sunset Wins.

Trying to escape certain death by four men pursuing him, Pete Knight, a cowhand seeking a job, sees a town ahead in the distance. 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. When Pete is jailed and lynched in the middle of the night by five men wearing burlap hoods. Pete's brother, Ben, a US deputy marshal, soon arrives seeking vengeance.

In "Death for Double-O Neighbors", Tom Lucas is torn by his loyalty to both Old Bob Hurley and his Double-O Ranch on one side and to the small ranchers on the other. Stanley Blanton, an engineer charting the mineral resources of the Northland, in the "Out Trail", crashes through a snow bridge with his sled and dogs in a blizzard. Court martialed and losing the woman he loved, Cass Morgan, in "Powder for Santa Anna", has been living recklessly, shipping freight. Tom Buckner, in "Hunted Wolf", quits Hal Stafford's Cross-T Ranch, and is pursued and left to die in the desert.

For many years, the Picture Rocks basin has sheltered the Jore family from the law. The basin also shelters a fabulous palomino stallion called Black Wing. The Jores have left him to run free with the wild herd, but Race Coulter has a different plan. He has convinced a young kid named Rene Rand to help him steal Black Wing. But when Rand is befriended by the Jores after a serious illness, he learns lessons that will change the direction of his life.