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."--

"Samuel Parker is traveling through the mountains hoping to find a place to settle his two children before lung fever kills him when they help an injured man whom Samuel fears may be an outlaw. As the man heals, he directs Samuel to Absaroka Valley where they are drawn into the center of a land fight"--

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...

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 Frank McCoy that if he looked out a window and saw a building less than two hundred...

The massacre at Fort Mims is what spurred young Davy Crockett to leave his family and become a volunteer scout in the military campaign between American militias and the Creek Indians. It was while serving in this capacity that Crockett earned his reputation as a first-rate scout, which added to his already established reputation as a crack shot. Like many volunteers serving in militias, Crockett also had to concern himself with protecting his wife,...

It was dusk when Todd Duncan sighted the man and his camp at a small oasis on the edge of the desert. Duncan, on his way to New Mexico to find work, knew better than to barge into a stranger's camp. After riding in and dismounting, he decided to make coffee before waking the stranger. When he called to the man, there was no response, so he walked over to find the man dead from a gunshot wound. It is then that he finds himself surrounded by Sheriff...

"The discovery of a man and his horse, both shot dead through the head, with $10,000 buried nearby in a desert canon near Springville, Arizona, lead Sheriff Claude Rainey to believe this is something bigger than a simple bushwhacking"--

In the middle of a harsh desert where water is the town's most valuable resource, an accused killer runs to escape the man who is trying to kill him. Troy Warfield is on the run. He is entering hostile New Mexico territory, where the heat sucks moisture from the earth and beats down the weak. Accused of killing a deputy U. S. Marshal, Warfield has been running for six hundred miles, evading the relentless pursuit of U. S. Marshal John Trent. Fulton,...

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...

Boss Spearman knows that times are changing on the open range for free-grazing cattlemen who don't own land. But more and more settlers are staking claim to the land, and when a local rancher kills one of Boss's crew, he knows he must make a stand.