Showing results by author "Lauran Paine" in All Categories

A western duo, featuring a Marshal on the trail of a professional bandit, and a bloody rivalry between two gunmen.

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. 

A widow with a small child, CarrieLee Belleau joined a westward-bound emigrant wagon train, hoping to wrest from the new lands a living for herself and her daughter. But the wild uncivilised West of the '50s was no place for a woman alone and CarrieLee had to face disaster, heartbreak and loneliness which culminated in the kidnapping of her baby by the terrible Comanches. Although she knew that there was very little chance of the cruel Comanches leaving her child alive, CarrieLee felt she must find out, one way or another, the ultimate fate of little Maria.

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.

George Carpenter has fallen in love with Irene Cobalt, his young Indian housekeeper. But local attorney Clarence Black wants Sheriff Frank Girard to put an end to this immoral association. 

Amos Swift's two sons find their father dead. Jason tells Amos to prepare the body for burial - while he, knowing the murderer's identity, sets out to even the score himself....

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.

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 in the saddlebags of the man the children have named Mr. Black, and he is certain they have taken an outlaw under wing.

When innocent Frank Travis gets killed because he’s thought to be a suspect for a robbery, his brother looks to seek revenge in the title story of this Western trio.

This Western duo includes stories about undercover rangers trying to expose a gang of livestock rustlers and an experienced gunfighter looking for vengeance in his hometown but instead encountering trouble....

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.

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.

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.

When Cuff Lockwood decides to leave the cold rangelands of Montana for warmer New Mexico, little does he know how hard he will find it to leave.

This Western duo contains tales of a wounded priest, reunited with his estranged daughter, and a town desperately trying not to let a shipment of rifles fall into the wrong hands.

This Western duo from Lauran Paine includes tales of murder, cattle rustling and lawmen. Two stories with mystery at their hearts.

The Wyoming territory is vast, rich with grasslands, and largely lawless. So when a conflict arises over whose herd gets to graze in those grasslands, then it's more likely to be settled with a shootout than a lawyer. The cattlemen believed their cows ought to have free grazing. It had been a long winter and the herd was hungry. But that means the sheep ranchers would have to move on, at gunpoint if necessary. But the way the sheep ranchers see things, they were there first, and the cowboys ought to be the ones looking for greener pastures.

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....

The open range men are free-grazing cattlemen, those who don't own land but drive their stock through the country to graze. Boss Spearman knows that times are changing. Local ranchers are staking claims to grazing areas and building up extensive cattle empires. Boss has no quarrel with that, but he won't be intimidated or scared off. So when Denton Baxter makes it clear, by killing one man and seriously wounding another, that he intends to drive Boss and his crew out, Boss must make a stand.

In Renegades Beat the War Drum, the frontiersman Caleb Dorn, known among the Indians as Silent Outcast, tries to negotiate with Red Sleeves and his band of Apaches who have surrounded the town of Denton and cut off all access. In Texas Herds Bring Death, Caleb has moved north into cattle country where a Texas herd is not permitted by the Crow nation to have access to the trail through their land. Feud on the Mesa concerns two saddle mates, Rufe Miller and Jud Hudson, who committed an ill-advised stagecoach robbery.