A man, a dog, and a horse. The call of the wild geese. A very smart doctor from the east who finds there is a lot to learn from these desert people. A woman loved by three men. A gunslinger who has a debt to settle. Max Brand brings them all together in another one of his over three hundred exciting western tales.

And he found life. Hardy cattle moved singly or in small groups and browsed on the withered bunch grass. Summer scorched them, winter humped their backs with cold and arched up their bellies with famine, but they were a breed schooled through generations for this fight against nature. In this junk-shop of the world, rattlesnakes were rulers of the soil. Overhead the buzzards, ominous black specks pendant against the white-hot sky, ruled the air.

Black Jack

Of the four men, Hal Sinclair was the vital spirit. In the actual labor of mining, the mighty arms and tireless back Of Quade had been a treasure. For knowledge of camping, hunting, cooking, and all the lore of the trail, Lowrie stood as a valuable resource; and Sandersen was the dreamy, resolute spirit, who had hoped for gold in those mountains until he came to believe his hope. He had gathered these three stalwarts to help him to his purpose, and if he lived he would lead yet others to failure. Hope never died in this tall, gaunt man, with a pale-blue eye the color of the horizon dusted with the first morning mist. He was the very spirit of lost causes, full of apprehensions, foreboding, superstitions. A hunch might make him journey five hundred miles; a snort of his horse could make him give up the trail and turn back.

A race track gambler has a plan to buy an Eden Gray horse and enter it into races and win a fortune, but when he finds the reclusive, deaf mute who owns the horses, the owner refuses to sell.

"I love Max Brand," said Stephen King. The master of horror is not alone, for the ace of horse operas continues to attract new readers. Trailin\' was an early novel full of the gusto and terse, fresh style that would make Brand\'s reputation.A Wild West story, Trailin\' opens in Madison Square Garden, where Anthony Woodbury accepts a challenge to ride a killer horse. When the man supposed to be his father is murdered, Woodbury follows the trail of the slayer west. As he pursues the secret of his birth, he takes huge risks that only a tenderfoot would entertain. "The story undeniably grips," wrote the reviewer for Anteneum when it was first published in 19200. Shortly after, popular star of western films Tom Mix appeared in a movie version.

The Great West prior to the century\'s turn abounded in legend. Stories were told of fabled gunmen whose bullets always magically found their mark of mighty stallions whose tireless gallop rivaled the speed of the wind of glorious women whose beauty stunned mind and heart. But nowhere in the vast spread of the mountain-desert country was there a greater legend told than the story of Red Pierre and the phantom gunfighter McGurk.

With gusts of wind fanning it roughly, the flame rose fast. Harrigan made other journeys to the rotten stump and wrenched away great chunks of bark and wood. He came back and piled them on the fire. It towered high, the upper tongues twisting among the branches of the tree. They laid Kate Malone between the windbreak and the fire. In a short time her trembling ceased; she turned her face to the blaze and slept.

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Bull Hunter

Ronicky Doone is a hero of the west, respected by the law-abiding citizen and hated by bushwhacking bandits. Bill Gregg is a man in love, not about to be deflected from meeting his lady love for the first time, and willing to stand up to the living legend to reach her. This initial meeting leads to a friendship between the two and they travel east to New York City on the trail of the girl. When they find the girl, Caroline Smith, and she refuses to leave, Ronicky must discover the secret that holds her. They encounter the sinister John Mark and the beautiful Ruth Tolliver and are exposed to the horrors and vices of big city life as they attempt to rescue Caroline and find their way back to the mountain-desert of the west.

Recently, a number of Western stories have been discovered among Max Brand's unpublished works and the first story in this book, "The White Streak," is one of them. Its protagonist is twenty-one-year-old Jimmy Babcock, a former football star, but now a worker at the local bank run by William Parker in the town of Dresser, which has changed from cattle country to one made up of oil and alfalfa fields. When Parker fires Jimmy, all Jimmy can think is how he will hurt Muriel Aiken, his fiancée, who wants to marry. When his father signs over the old family homestead that is in serious need of repair, Jimmy feels better. But an unexpected invitation from Parker to meet him at the Club convinces him that Parker wants him back. When he learns what Parker really has in mind, Jimmy finds himself recalling the stories he has heard about the notorious robbers the White Streak and Utah Billie, and he has to make a hard decision. In "The Masked Rider" the betrothed of Carlos Torreño, Lucia...

"Blondy" is a 1924 short story originally published in Colliers — a change of pace for Max Brand, as its western hero is paired with a dog."No pulp writer was more prolific than Frederick Faust, who wrote nearly 15 million words under the pen name of Max Brand and seventeen others. He sold all his stories and sometimes wrote complete issues of Western Story Magazine." — The Incredible Pulps

From legendary Western author Max Brand comes a collection of stories about a slave, a jewel thief, and a captive.In “Master and Man," Bobbie is a black man who can outride, outfight, and outshoot any white man in the mountain desert. His unwavering moral code serves as a model for his often cruel and dissolute white master.“A Lucky Dog" is a tale of the desperate flight of a jewel thief named Hagger from the man he robbed. In Colorado, facing a battle with winter cold and snow, he comes upon an isolated cabin and its sole occupant, a weakened bull terrier left there to starve to death. The man and dog come to depend on each other—to a point where Hagger would make any sacrifice and endure any hardship just to keep the dog alive.In the title story, “Red Fire," Paul Torridon, called White Thunder by the Cheyenne Indians, and his girlfriend, Nancy Brett, are being held prisoner by the Cheyenne because they believe he can cure illness and...

The thrilling conclusion to Max Brand's Rusty Sabin trilogy.Born to white parents, Rusty Sabin was taken prisoner and raised by the Cheyennes in Sacred Valley. The Cheyennes know him now as Red Hawk, an admired leader and great warrior. Sabin falls in love with Maisry Lester, a young frontierswoman, and decides to desert the Cheyennes to pursue a different kind of life, but fate soon intervenes.Sabin finds two bags of gold in a Sacred Valley creek and decides to leave one with the Cheyennes and give one to Maisry. When a local frontiersman decides to try and pilfer the sack that Sabin designated for the Cheyennes, Maisry's father is killed in the crossfire. Standing Bull, a Cheyenne leader, is wrongfully blamed for the murder, and Sabin finds himself in the middle of a frontiersmen-Indian conflict. He'll have to figure out where exactly his loyalty lies and how to resolve a conflict threatening to erupt in bloodshed.First serialized in 1935, The Sacred...