Showing results by narrator "David michaels" in All Categories

Smoke Jensen drives a herd of longhorns to Dodge City, and finds a town in the grip of terror - its only lawman outgunned by a cutthroat gang led by the West's most notorious outlaw. His name is "Bloody Bill" Anderson, a Confederate guerrilla whose violent career as a gunhawk has earned him a deadly reputation. Now he's found his match in the Mountain Man - and it's time for an all-out war.

Robber baron Clifton Satterlee's plan is twofold and simple: Wrest the timber-thick hills in New Mexico Territory from the Tua Pueblo and then populate the town with his own subservient labor force. But in his near-perfect campaign of terror, Satterlee has overlooked one mighty obstacle: Smoke Jensen.

In the depth of a cruel High Lonesome winter comes a cryptic message for Smoke Jensen. The letter tells of skullduggery by gold barons, railroad magnates, and Chinese tongs in San Francisco. Smoke knows only one person in the city by the bay: the well-rounded, open-natured Francie, mistress of one of the town's most notorious pleasure palaces.

There were some who knew Smoke Jensen as a hero...and there were others who believed the dark side of the legend — that he was an outlaw who'd killed over 300 men. But when Smoke wakes up with a gut-wrenching headache in a New Mexico jail cell, he feels as helpless as a newly whelped cougar cub — with a lease on his life shorter than the blink of an eye.

Smoke Jensen is the most powerful man on the Sugarloaf frontier - and he's all that stands between a greedy group of Eastern slickers and their schemes for a criminal empire in the Rockies. When Smoke heads back to Boston with his wife, it gives his enemies the opening they'd been waiting for: to kill the mountain man and take over the West.

The gold-mining town of Red Light, Montana is the kind of backwater hole less famous for the folks that live there than the ones who die there - like Janey Jensen, Smoke Jensen's sister. Smoke never would have gone there if it hadn't been for her estate. But that isn't the only thing the Mountain Man's got to settle. There's also the score between him and Major Cosgrove. The man who owns Red Light - lock, stock and barrel - is six feet of trouble looking for somebody like Smoke to bring out the worst in him.

He was raised by the mountain man called Preacher, and he was said to be the fastest gun alive. Until he hung up his gunbelts to raise a family. Smoke Jensen was the last mountain man and a force of nature. But Lee Slater and his gang of low life desperadoes didn’t know that. Stirring up a motherlode of trouble for the retired gunslinger was Slater’s first mistake. Shooting Smoke Jensen’s wife Sally was his second.

When Big Max Huggins, the outlaw leader of a nearby cutthroat town, tries to impose his influence on Barlow, Smoke Jensen promptly sends the gang packing, but they retaliate by kidnapping his wife, and Smoke must save her as well as the town.

Smoke Jensen sat in a cave and boiled the last of his coffee. He figured he was in Idaho — somewhere south of Montpelier — but he was certain about only two things: He was cold and he was being hunted by a small army of men. Smoke knew why he was cold — it was winter. He just didn't have a clear idea of why anyone was after him.

Smoke Jensen couldn't have cared less about a range war that had erupted in far-off Montana. But when his cousin Fae is stuck right in the middle of the hundred-gun showdown that's exploding in bullets and blood, he rides to intercede in the name of family. He's joined on his mission by the Moab Kid and legendary gunfighters Charlie Starr and Pistol Le Roux.

Smoke Jensen was buying cattle a hundred miles away from his Colorado ranch when he got the news. He saddled up, rode off, and didn’t stop until he reached his wife’s side. She had been shot three times and lay close to death. Smoke knew the outlaws had come to kill him and he wasn’t going to give them a second chance. He was going after them.

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.

In the 1870s, as the country recovered from the War Between the States, the expansion of railroads and the discovery of gold opened the American west to both civilization and savagery. Men and women on both sides of the law were drawn by the chance to make a fortune, and there was often a big difference between Law and Justice. Into this whirlwind rode Nathan Stone, a man whose trail of vengeance gave him a reputation for speed with a gun. He tracked and killed the seven men who murdered his family after the war.

In the 1870s, as the country recovered from the War Between the States, the expansion of railroads and the discovery of gold opened the American west to both civilization and savagery. Men and women on both sides of the law were drawn by the chance to make a fortune, and there was often a big difference between Law and Justice. Into this whirlwind rode Nathan Stone, a man whose trail of vengeance gave him a reputation for speed with a gun. He tracked and killed the seven men who murdered his family after the war.

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.

Riverboat gambling is a blast, until hot-headed Chance finds out just what he won in his final hand against a Missouri River gambler named Haggarty. Chance's "prize" is a beautiful Chinese slave girl named Ling. The twins want to set Ling free and keep their cash, but at Fort Benton, Ling gives them the slip, robbing them blind. When they hunt her down in Rimfire, Montana, she's with Haggarty, lining up their next mark.

On the trail west with his trusty horse and dog, the hapless gunslinger stops a mean, hungry bear from making lunch out of the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody. In turn, Cody grubstakes Dooley for the purchase of a silver mine in the lawless, violent boomtown of Leadville, Colorado. Dooley can’t believe his good luck. But when he guns down three deadly outlaws, the grateful townsfolk pin a sheriff’s badge on Dooley. And that’s when his luck runs out....

In 1848, Dooley Monahan, son of struggling Iowa pioneers, went off to pick up a new milk cow. Young Dooley never came home. Now, nearly three decades later, Dooley Monahan has become an accidental legend, managing to plant a bullet in the chest of a dangerous outlaw. All Dooley really wants is to claim his reward at a bank in Phoenix and make his way north to a gold strike he read about in a newspaper. But fate has other plans.

I do remember my first love Mad Carter MacRae recalls in this memoir of his early life. Her name was Estrella O Sullivan. I met her the summer I turned 16 back in 1873. The summer of 1873 marked my last drive up what these days they call the Chisholm Trail and what some were starting to call it back then. It was the first time I tasted oysters and the only time I pinned on a badge. It was the summer of longhorns of miserable heat of friendship and betrayal and of murder. In the end it was the summer the whole world came crumbling down on our United States. My world crashed too.