Showing results by author "Ernest Haycox" in All Categories

There's nothin' like a story of love, giving and happiness for Christmas. 

Jim Hunter has been making a go of it for three years on his desert-land homestead. Fighting the desert is no place for a woman, and that was what he had told the woman he loved when he left Portland. But Mary thinks otherwise as she, too, comes to homestead in the high desert. 

The double-crosser clipped me and transferred guns! A murdering thief slips into Budd's store looking for food and cash. He doesn't have long; the sheriff's only minutes behind. He's Budd's son. 

Life on his place outside Burnt Creek in Oregon has become hard for old man Cruze. His daughter in Portland needs 50 dollars badly for an operation, and Cruze doesn't have the money. Then a way seems to come to him. A young fugitive being chased by the sheriff stops at his place. He would be willing to pay the old man 50 dollars to hide him out. 

Ralph Olmstead has found life hard in central Oregon in 1904. Three masked men have held up the Bend-Klamath mail stage four miles north of Burnt Creek. A 500 dollar reward is being offered for their apprehension. That money could make the difference between ruin and survival. 

Slim Shafter rode into Dry Gulch in search of a drink. What he found there was worth far more than the $10 fine that he had to pay the sheriff. He found his father’s killer, Gann Hardesty. Would this be a night of vengeance, when every roustabout's gun was aimed at Shafter, or just an evening’s entertainment?     

Lieutenant Parke Stobo was assigned to take 25 men, a guide, and three days' rations into the mesquites by way of Pete Kempel's ranch. Stobo was also instructed to give the greenhorn Lieutenant Wells a taste of the country. It should have been just a routine detail.

As proprietor of a lone boardinghouse in an isolated canyon, Kelsey Taggert is accustomed to the hardscrabble life he endures in the tough Western country. But when a stagecoach brings a beautiful, wily woman and an outlaw to his door, Taggert begins to look for the gentler things in life with which to balance the harsh and stark realities of existence in the West. 

Sycamore Smith has been moving from town to town in search of his brother and his girl for nearly a year. Now, while working a cattle-wrangling job with a motley crew of riders, further details of his brother’s disappearance are about to become known.

Entrusted with the delivery of one hundred pounds of gold to his partners, Johnny Potter faces four days of hard riding alone in a land of robbers and treacherous terrain.

Tonight the bullets will fly and rancher or rustler will die. A mystery man will decide whose blood will stain the sick streets of Star.

This is a realistic tale of settlers in a town called Ingrid. It is a classic Western, set against the extraordinary environment of the West as it always was: stark, savage, and brutal. 

Several travelers risk death, and worse, to reach Lordsburg, Arizona. Among them - an English hunter, a whiskey drummer, a young woman known only as Henriette, an army officer's fiancée, a gambler, and Malpais Bill, who's on his way to a gunfight. The stage route crosses hostile Apache territory - and they will be spotted.

Peter Skene takes what he wants and kills who he wants. Settlers, squatters, rustlers and Indian war parties can't stop him from owning the Bitter Valley and the biggest ranch in Oregon.

“Looking for a little trouble, boys?” asked Wild Bill Hickok. Cowhands surround Buck LaGrange with a sea of fists in a battle that was bound to happen. Why? Because Abilene is packed with angry cattlemen, desperate settlers, ambitious landowners and at least one famous gunslinger. Who'll shoot first? 

He grabbed a broken axe handle and circled around Matt Hobart. Rustlers are at work, hidden in the chill darkness of a prairie December. It's bad news for the Hobarts - losing their calf could mean starvation. Can Matt fight alone?

This is the story the led to the classic John Ford and John Wayne 1939 movie of the same name. Listen as a small group of travelers ride their way to their destination, trying to avoid the dangers of the trail, including the famous Geronimo!

Old Gabe is accustomed to younger, arrogant men roughing him up. When a newcomer comes in between Gabe and an ugly brawl with a fiery upstart, Gabe isn’t sure how to respond. By helping Gabe, the newcomer has made himself the target of vicious repercussions, but warning him of the danger would break a sacred, unspoken code of the West: Never venture into another man’s business. Yet, since the newcomer has already broken into Gabe’s business, Gabe starts to question if the code should be kept. 

A disillusioned doctor and a brave woman join forces in a dangerous deception. It had better work.

The lure of the American West is in the spirit of adventure, in the majestic expanse of unconquered wilderness and in rugged individuals on a quest for identity and sometimes for survival. Owen Wister's unsmiling Virginian... Dorothy M. Johnson's, "A Man Called Horse": These are a few of the colorful, even legendary characters who populate The American West in Fiction, a collection of stories edited by Jon Tuska.