Big Country

In “Ride, You Tonto Raiders,” a man on his deathbed gives Matt Sabre $5,000 and begs him to take the money to his wife who is alone defending the family ranch. “War Party” brings together a boy on the brink of manhood, a resourceful frontier woman, and a strong, eligible male character.

In “West of the Tularosa,” Ward McQueen, foreman for the Tumbling K, is accused of killing a nearby rancher and he's going to need some help to prove his innocence. In “Home in the Valley,” Steve Mehan can still recoup the money to save five ranches back home if only he can make it from Sacramento to Seattle on horseback and beat the steamer carrying some bad news. In “West Is Where the Heart Is,” home is still more than two hundred miles away when Jim London comes across the burned-out wagon train with only one survivor, a five-year-old girl. He'll have to take her with him.

Louis L'Amour said that the West was no place for the frightened or the mean. It was a “big country needing big men and women to live in it.” This volume presents five more of L'Amour's fine short stories about the West. The Paiute in “The Nester and the Paiute” is someone Sheriff Todd has been keeping his eye on. In “His Brother's Debt,” Casady had reasons for not going to town, but he couldn't say no to a lady. In “Four Card Draw,” Allen Ring wins a small ranch in a poker game, but Marshall Bilton says no one is allowed to live there. In “The Turkeyfeather Riders,” Jim Sandifer knows that what he plans to do will forfeit him the gal he loves. In “Riding for the Brand,” Jed Asbury finds an abandoned covered wagon and decides to finish what the former owners had intended to do.