Central Kansas Library System

For the westerner trouble came with the territory. Long grass valleys, merciless deserts, sheer rock cliffs, icy streams, hidden trails, dusty towns. These were the proving grounds of daily life. At any time violence could explode and on the frontier there was no avoiding its sudden terrible impact. In this collection of his stories Louis L’Amour guides us to some of these untamed places where men and women faced the challenge of survival.

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Fast-shooting cowpuncher Hopalong Cassidy must think fast to save lives and see justice served when he arrives at the Circle J to deliver a fortune in bank notes to his friend, rancher Dick Jordan, and finds Jordan and his daughter Pam being held hostage by a desperate band of outlaws.

Her grandfather wants her to move home, and Molly thinks she just might. His ranch will be a good place for her sons to grow up, a place to escape big-city influence. Then she learns-from a stranger named Sam Dakota-that her grandfather is ill. Possibly dying. Molly packs up the kids without a second thought and makes the long drive to Sweetgrass, Montana. Once she arrives, she immediately has questions about Sam Dakota. Why is he working on her...

It was no crime for a young cowboy to want to talk to a pretty girl, but that was what got Tom Lundy killed. The hard men of the Tumbling B, who had survived stampede and Kiowa lance to drive their herd up from Big Bend country, wanted to burn the town down. But Kate Lundy, the Tumbling B's owner, had a better plan. Calling on dozens of seasoned fighters, Kate aimed to strangle the town that lived off cowboy money but had no use for the Texans themselves....

A sequel to Doc is based on the true events of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Wyatt Earp's survival against a backdrop of volatile politics in 1881 America. This was America in 1881: a deeply divided nation; vicious politics; a shamelessly partisan media; a president loathed by half the populace. On October 26, when Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers faced off against the Clantons and the McLaurys in Tombstone, Arizona, Wyatt Earp was the last...

It was no work for a woman. That's what they told Mary Breydon when she came to manage a rundown stagecoach station on the Cherokee Trail. But Mary had no choice. Her fine Virginia home burned to ashes in the Civil War and her husband was brutally shot down on the way to Colorado. She needed to make a new beginning for herself and her young daughter on the raw frontier. Isolated in an untamed land, their life at the station was achingly hard and they...

Two backcountry skiers find the body of a young woman embedded in the ice of a remote mountain creek. All through the night, police work with arc lights and chain saws to dig her out. But identification doesn't take as long. Abbie Cooper is wanted for murder and acts of eco-terrorism, and her picture is on law-enforcement computers all across America. But just how did she die? And what was the trail of events that led this joyous, golden child of...

"What if you woke up lying in the middle of the street in the infamous town of Fort Pratt, Montana, where thirty, young Native boys perished in a tragic 1896 boarding school fire? What if every person you encountered in that endless night was dead? What if you were covered in blood and missing a bullet from the gun holstered on your hip? What if there was something out there in the yellowed skies--along with the deceased and the smell of ash and dust--something...

Tell Sackett meets the beautiful Dorinda Robiseau, traveling lady of wit and nerve. Tell is carrying thirty pounds of gold. The young man raised in the mountains begins to wonder if their meeting is a coincidence, especially when the woman convinces him to guide her across the desert to Los Angeles. Tell knows a lot about the desert, but a woman can make him forget what he knows. The trail is strewn with bad men and natural obstacles. One of...

In the midst of the largest motorcycle rally in the world, a young biker is run off the road and ends up in critical condition. When Sheriff Walt Longmire and his good friend Henry Standing Bear are called to Hulett, Wyoming -- the nearest town to America's first national monument, Devils Tower -- to investigate, things start getting complicated. As competing biker gangs, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, a military-grade vehicle donated...