Showing results by author "Ralph Compton" in All Categories

England Dan Rutledge and his partner John Cooley have worked their claim for a year and are barely eking out a living. When Cooley shows up with a map of the abandoned Irish Lord Mine he drunkenly bought off a shady cowboy, England Dan is sure it’s a complete fraud. After all, no one knows what happened to the most valuable gold mine in the Superstition Mountains after a banshee frightened off the last owner.

When 25-year-old Lewis Taylor is released from the Texas State Prison, he receives little attention as he walks into the midday sunlight, free after serving five years for a crime he didn't commit. His only interest is in getting back to his hometown of Gila Bend, Texas, a quiet farming community about which he has only warm, idyllic memories. During his long years in prison, he survived by thinking fondly of the home he'd known since boyhood and of one special girl, Darla Winslow.

Fresh from a successful trail drive, cattle hand Seth Coe is feeling flush, especially after a lucky streak at the poker table. But his good fortune earns him a dangerous enemy, notorious tinhorn gambler Hannibal Fisher, who is none too happy about being cleaned out. The innocent Coe starts the long ride back to Texas with big plans to buy his own ranch. All he needs now, he figures, is a wife. To his amazement, in tiny Prairie Fire, Kansas he meets the perfect woman, his childhood love Josette Dubois.

After years as a professional gambler - and a deadly shootout on a riverboat casino - Tom Calvert and his young protégé, Asher Smith, have survived an arduous journey across the frontier to Friendly Field, Idaho. The bucolic Quaker community welcomes them with open arms, and soon Tom is courting a widow and learning, to his surprise, to enjoy the quiet life. Then an elder of Friendly Field is found murdered, and the townsfolk start whispering about the work of the devil. Tom doesn’t believe in the devil, just the evil that men do, and he resolves to solve the gruesome crime.

A gunman without a gun wakes up in Death Valley. He has no recollection of how he got there, or even his own name. He's a dead man walking until his luck turns. He stumbles upon the homestead of a widow and her young son who nurse him back to health. But in the desert good deeds come at a cost. The amnesiac is being trailed by hard men who want answers he doesn't have. First a group of gunslingers, then a troop of soldiers threaten the innocent family.

Young doctor Gabriel Kincaid has come west to help an aging colleague who is straining to deal with the demands of a growing town, but Kincaid is looking to do more than just experience the challenges of frontier medicine. He’s determined to start a new life. But the trials he faces aren’t confined to the doctor’s surgery. After an incident in a saloon, Kincaid finds himself with a new nickname: Dr. Death. It’s dangerous to have a reputation as a good man with a gun. In this world, there will always be someone who wants to test you.

Matt Wheeler was a legend in the West. His fast gun and dedication to justice made him a sought-after lawman for hire, but all of that promise vanished one sunny day when his wife was shot down in cold blood by a heartless bank robber. The thirst for vengeance sent Wheeler on a quest to find the killer. For taking the law into his own hands, the former lawman was convicted and sent to prison. Seven and a half years have passed, and Wheeler has completed his sentence. One question remains: Will he ride for vengeance or for justice?

Nathan Stone was a living legend in the West as a lawman, as an outlaw, as a gambler, as a wanderer through the wildest towns and terrain. He blazed a vengeance trail, giving no quarter and asking for none. Fearlessly, he played his cards and used his Colt .45s as best he could in games of chance, skill, and savagery, for stakes of life or death. Now he was riding on a course that would test his rawhide nerve and lightning draw against the likes of Doc Holliday, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the fleeing James brothers, and the incredible John Wesley Hardin....

Nathan Stone returns to his Virginia home to discover that the horrors of the Civil War are not over; his family has been wiped out, and their home burned by seven renegades. Nathan swears an oath on his father’s grave to find and kill each of the men responsible. He begins a lonely journey that will take him south and west, on a vengeance trail that crosses the paths of some infamous figures, including “Wild Bill” Hickok, Roy Bean, and Frank and Jesse James.

Nathan Stone returns to his Virginia home to discover that the horrors of the Civil War are not over; his family has been wiped out, and their home burned by seven renegades. Nathan swears an oath on his father’s grave to find and kill each of the men responsible. He begins a lonely journey that will take him south and west, on a vengeance trail that crosses the paths of some infamous figures, including “Wild Bill” Hickok, Roy Bean, and Frank and Jesse James.

In her disguise as "Danny Duggin," Danielle Strange has spent the past two years hunting down the outlaws who murdered her father. Reunited with her brothers, the twins Tim and Jed, she plans to take her war across the border into Mexico - unaware she's being pursued by a US Federal Marshal.... Saul Delmano comes from a powerful family of cattle-men whose business stretches from the Southwestern territories into Mexico. He's put a $2,000 reward on "Danny Duggin's" head, tempting every outlaw and bounty hunter across the West to try to collect it.

The Border Empire trilogy concludes, as Wes Stone’s quest for revenge leads him to destroy the plot by the Golden Dragon gang to endanger US currency by switching counterfeit coins for real ones within the walls of four different mints in the southwest. Battling long odds and high stakes, Stone and his friends El Lobo and Byron Silver must solve a double kidnapping, face a mercenary army of renegades from the Sandlin gang who are assembling in Durango, and avoid the many young hotheads who seek to add to their own reputations by challenging Wes’s skill with a gun.

Wes Stone was once a lawman. Then the Sandlin Gang shot down his father, known as The Gunfighter. Swearing vengeance, he takes up his father's guns. But little does he know that the odds are even more against him than he thinks - and that to get revenge for a dead man, he might have to die himself....

The people of Meridian, Colorado, live and die by coal mining, and when the railroad bypasses them, their livelihood is in peril. However, they discover that for a hefty sum of money they can create a spur line and save the town. A hefty sum the town does not have. Their only hope is former gambler Asa Newcombe. The townspeople pool their money so Newcombe can enter the big poker game in Golden Junction, and as much as he wants to leave his past life behind, the whole town is counting on him.

Luke Hadley never imagined he would be left for dead with a chest full of bullets on the day of his wedding. All he wanted to do was tend to his farm with his new wife, Audrey, and begin their lives together. But when the Rhodes Gang crashes his wedding party, they wreak havoc and abduct his bride, leaving the lifeless bodies of his guests. Luke has only a sparse trail of clues to follow, but with help from a phony Pinkerton badge and a mysterious woman with many skills - including breaking him out of jail - he finally rides down those who’ve wronged him....

Big Jake Motley had been running the Big M spread in Texas for more than 30 years. In that time, he's driven thousands of head of cattle to market in Kansas. Now, while both the 19th century and the era of trail drives are coming to an end, Big Jake is determined to make one last drive to Kansas. The only thing is, he doesn't have the cowhands to move that much beef. He drafts his old friend, Chance McCandles, into service, and together, the two aging cowboys put together a crew.

His wife is gone to tuberculosis, his reputation was lost in the war, most of his life has already passed by, and now, even his horse has been taken by colic. All Carpenter has left are the men from his Army company. During the journey to California to reunite with them, he strikes up a friendship with Rafael Silva, an educated man making for the same town to start up a rifle factory. When they arrive, Carpenter's former brothers-in-arms actually try to run Silva out of town, despite the much-needed factory. There's trouble afoot....

Brothers Clay and Cal Breckenridge, sons of a hardscrabble East Texas farmer, never did see eye to eye. Clay, the eldest, returned home after the Civil War to help his father run the family farm; Cal deserted his military post and disappeared into a new life with a new name. Everyone knew who was the good son and who was the bad. Clay had almost forgotten his wayward brother until the morning a limping horse approaches the farm with young Cal Breckenridge’s body slumped in the saddle, shot in the back.

John Stockbridge was once a peaceful man of medicine. Now, he's better known as Dr. Vengeance, a man who is as fast with a shotgun as any other gunfighter is with a six-gun. The murders of his wife and child left him with an aching hole where his soul once was. His only solace comes from wandering the West. Along the way, he encounters a woman and her two children searching for their missing fur-trapper husband/father in the Rockies. In the process, they run afoul of some former Confederates who have amassed money and local power by robbing those traveling west through a mountain pass.

Tom Navarro, a hostler at the Bar-V Ranch, has retired his gun-slinging boots to find peace of mind. As much as he enjoys working for Paul Vannorsdell, owner and operator of Bar-V, Navarro has plans of moving up north with the woman he loves to open his own ranch and create a new life for himself. Vannorsdell, too, has big dreams: he wants to buy the Rancho de Cava from an old friend, Don Francisco, so he can become one of the largest landholders in Southern Arizona. Everything seems to be going according to plan until Don Francisco is found dead by Bullet Creek.