Mastincala, the Rabbit Boy, is born in a tumultuous and uncertain time for his people, the Lakota. He is but a boy when his father is killed during the clash between the Lakota and Colonel Harney s army at Rosebud, and he vows to avenge his father s death. Mastincala joins Crazy Horse and the Oglala on their rides against the Crow, fighting against the encroachment and overhunting of Big Horn country. He earns the name Tacante, Buffalo Heart, for his courage during one particularly fierce battle, and sheds his softer boyhood persona. When gold is discovered in the sacred Black Hills, a series...

Pinto Lowery never wanted anything more than the chance to raise a family and find a piece of land he could call his own. But after fighting in the Civil War, he couldn t settle, and instead drifted all over the West breaking mustangs, haunted by the ghosts of his fallen comrades. All that changed in a flash. There didn t seem to be a good reason to leave mustanging to go work on the farm of Mister Tully Oakes while Oakes travels north on a cattle drive. The man had a reputation for being stingy, ornery and contrary. But when Pinto met Elsie Oakes and her young children, an old yearning stirs...

Eight years ago, forty-year-old Caulfield Blake was run out of the West Texas town of Simpson by a lynch mob. As sheriff, he d been called on to carry out justice. But the War was ending and upholding the law was a tough kind of business. And when it meant hanging Colonel Henry Simpson s son for killing an unpopular federal judge, the community including Blake s own wife and children wanted no part of him. Now Colonel Simpson wants to expand his spread and force out his neighbors, so he blocks up Carpenter Creek and dries up the already barren soil. There s only one man who will stand up to...

Jennifer Vandermeer hated Kansas. With all her heart, she wished that she d never left the dull security of Ohio, had never let her husband, Walter, take her from the order and civilization of the East. There was no preacher in Four Corners, Kansas, so Seth Baker, at the behest of his wife, improvised the words. Jennifer, her two young children, and a small group of strangers, listened as they clustered in a spot freshly scythed around the rectangular pit. Walter had not been long among us before he was taken away, but, uh, he was a good, uh, farmer and a good, uh, man It just didn t make...

Johnny Montana was tall and dark, and sport a thin, neatly trimmed mustache and he had midnight black eyes. He was particular about his person; he shaved regular and put rosewater in his hair and preferred clean shirts when he could get them Johnny Montana was the kind of man who made things happen. You planning on sticking around these parts for the rest of your days? That question completely changed Katie Swensen s life .She knew in an instant that her answer would be no if Johnny Montana was asking her to go away with him. They left in the late hours of a warm evening, her daddy snoring in...

Ben Wheeler learned his law in a Yankee prison, but he learned to be a gunman on the Chisholm Trail. In prison he met the lovely Quaker nurse Abigail Carter, who agrees to become Wheeler s bride when he is paroled after the Confederate surrender. At the urging of his mentor, Angus Finlay, the couple moves to San Miguel, Texas, and stake out a small claim. But then a blaze of bullets takes away his bride in a bank holdup, and Wheeler vows to find her killers. He signs on as a trail hand on Finlay s cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail, pursuing justice frontier-style."

Back in the winter of 77 I was deputying up in Two Scalp, Dakota Territory; waiting for my friend Clete Shannon who was the Sheriff there at the time to say the word for us to quit our jobs and head south Being Clete s deputy give me mighty little to do but think things over, morning or night. Two Scalp s deader n a sucker in a sandstorm. This lazy peace would not last. Willie Goodwin had seen a lot of life; he knew how the death wind could blow into a man s life on a clear sunny day without a sip of warning. He thought he knew how treacherous life could be that s why he drank. When Nell...

Peter D. Buckow hadn t had much luck in his short life. An abused and neglected child, he struggled hard to overcome the disadvantages of his upbringing. He worked hard as Henry Blough s ranch hand; he labored from sunup til sundown; he never shirked a task. But when Henry Blough tries to cheat the sixteen-year-old Buck of his pay, he decides to take his wages out in steers Caught red handed by the deputy Sheriff, poor Peter Buckow is hanged with his own rope and left for dead. Except Buckow didn t die. He survived and was given an extraordinary chance at a second life. And now he had to...

The tinkling of guitars in the moonlight; the softly hummed words of a Spanish love song; the sweet, liquid music of the bells in the mission San Carlos De Carmelo; fleeting pictures of old Father Junipero Serro these and a hundred other rich memories flood the mind as one unfolds the story of little Suzanna, a peon girl, poor, futureless at a time when the Dons and the grandsons of the conquistadores were supreme in California. You think of Ramona; the dust covered stretches of El Camino Real the King s Highway appear before your eyes; you hear the roaring of quaint, old-fashioned,...

This was the climax; the end of a lifetime of bitterness and hate Rusty Maxwell and Ben Sharp, both grown old, grizzled, and rich; one the owner of a barbed-wire empire, a sea of grass larger than some Eastern states; the other risen to great political power, ruthlessly scheming to break the man with whom he had clashed ever since both had driven their longhorn herds over the trail to Dodge. To cut that empire in two, to bring its over-lord to his knees, had long been Ben Sharp s purpose. And in the South Western Pacific Railroad he found a weapon admirably forged to accomplish this end. But...