That got me to thinking. What if Beacher remembered my name was Horton, not Tolbert? And, what would he do if he found out I had shot my superior officer and deserted the Army? I was probably reported missing in the Indian fight and presumed dead. A lot of them fort Captains left missing men on their pay roster and collected the wages themselves. They considered it as their retirement fund. They'd just give the pay master a nice raise and if he didn't want to, they'd just reassign him to t...

Jud Low had been through his share of hard times and troubles. He'd seen his friend killed, the ranch and cattle stolen. But Jud and his partner, Ted Lewis, had taken revenge for their friend and gotten his life's work back. Now, all Jud wanted to do was have a dance with a pretty new waitress that had come to town.Getting together a dance at the last minute wasn't easy, but Jud managed it. The dance with the new waitress, Nancy, lasted longer than he'd bargained for, with her retur...

Jud Low was eighteen years old, from the East, and as green as could be when is father decided to pull up stakes and set them on the Oregon Trail. Not far from Abilene, Kansas, the two were put out of the wagon train after Jud's father got into an argument with the wagon master. The father and son headed south.Not long after, Jud found himself alone and on foot, his father having frozen to death during a cold winter night. He made his way south and stumbled onto a small cattle ranc...

Raised in an orphanage and deemed by the nuns who looked after him as another "Casualty of War," John never knew his real last name. It wasn't until years later, by fate, that he took a name that would become the signature of his true calling in life.Hired simply because of the color of his skin, a benefit as seen by Judge Isaac Parker, Sam Bass quickly became one of the west's most infamous U.S. Marshals. Because he was black, he often found mistreatment from the whites he was swor...

US Marshal Sam Bass, the first black marshal, was living an easy life. He'd retired from riding the trails and chasing outlaws, and was comfortable with just being Judge Isaac Parker's right hand. While at the saloon one evening, he met up with a traveling whiskey salesman, who offered to sell him two guns.When Bass saw the old Colt .45, its bluing gone and the nick in the barrel, he knew it was the exact same gun he'd been told was evil by a voodoo queen some years back. All of a s...

James Luke Landon was born in the United States to a father who was a cotton farmer and a shrewd business man. After the Civil War, labor was almost impossible to find to work the cotton fields. Luke's father enlisted the aid of a friend who lived overseas and moved his family to Bombay, India, where land prices were cheap, labor was abundant, and cotton grew with a vengeance.At the age of nineteen, Luke lost his father in a warehouse fire and his mother to a heart attack shortly a...

Me and Beacher rode south from my cabin in the general direction of Cairo, Illinois. I remembered Pop saying there was a horse-shoe bend in the river as it turned back north. It was still and always shallower, easy to cross and not too many tree snags, as most of them would pile up on the south side of the bend. Wagons had been crossing there for years and it was a lot safer than other places. Beacher had a compass he had gotten for his birthday one time. Heck, the only thing I ever got fo...

That got me to thinking. What if Beacher remembered my name was Horton, not Tolbert? And, what would he do if he found out I had shot my superior officer and deserted the Army? I was probably reported missing in the Indian fight and presumed dead. A lot of them fort Captains left missing men on their pay roster and collected the wages themselves. They considered it as their retirement fund. They'd just give the pay master a nice raise and if he didn't want to, they'd just reassign him to t...

Dan Brady and Jimmy Ray. One of white lineage, the other of Indian decent. Brothers by choice (and possibly necessity) from being raised in a Chicago orphanage run by nuns. They parted ways after being kicked out of the orphanage. Dan became a lawman. Jimmy Ray changed his name and became an outlaw.When their paths finally crossed again, Brady wired for help from the Texas Rangers. Being afraid his long-ago friend would come after him, Brady took the time to write down everything he...

Red O'Fallon had helped Sheriff John McKenzie of Fort Worth and a couple of Texas Rangers, track down and safely return the kidnapped niece of his boss, rancher John Chisolm. Content with working as foreman on the Chisolm Ranch, Red finds himself being sought after by the Texas Rangers to help in solving another kidnapping case. This time, the young son of Fort Worth's banker.O'Fallon finds himself working alongside the infamous Texas Ranger Beacher Tolbert and his cousin, Ranger Jo...

A man named Conner was signing people up for a wagon train going to Oregon, leaving in the spring. Conner had a flyer that made it seem like a paradise. Seth had one of the flyers and showed it to his wife, Alice, at supper one night. They talked it over for a month before they decided to go west with the wagon train.Seth already had a wagon and a team of young oxen that were broke to a double yoke. Seth's blacksmith tools would be loaded into the wagon, with room for supplies, bedd...

It took Beacher longer than he figured to find the Colorado River. By the time he made camp, the sun was at the west back. "Just right," he said to himself. He cut some bank poles and found some toad frogs. "The smaller ones work better," Beacher thought. "Now all I need are some hooks and line, with no weights. Just run your hook under the frog's backbone near his hind legs, and he won't bleed a bit. He'll swim toward the bank all night." Tolbert knew that the forked-tail catfish was a to...