Dan Killoe--over six feet of tough, raw, lightning fast man. He had a trail heard and a mass of settlers to get across unknown territory to a new land. Then he gave shelter to a stranger being hunted by Felipe Soto, scar-faced leader of the renegade Comancheros. This time Killoe was borrowing more trouble than he wanted to handle.

A Spur Award-winning novelist of the American West tells the story of a farmboy from Texas who joins a cattle drive to Kansas, during which he becomes an apprentice to a veteran cowboy and clashes with a notorious outlaw.

In 1871 Joshua Loper, a sixteen-year-old black cowboy, records in his journal his experiences while making his first cattle drive under an unsympathetic trail boss.

"After completing a successful cattle drive as the chuckwagon cook, Mac signs up for another one to escape those seeking revenge for a crime he did not commit"--Amazon.com.

Framed for murder, Dewey "Mac" McKenzie is running for his life. Though Mac's never even made a pot of coffee, he talks his way onto a cattle drive heading west--as a chuckwagon cook. Turns out he has a natural talent for turning salt pork and dried beans into culinary gold. He's as good with a pot and pan as he is with a gun--which comes in handy on a dangerous trail drive beset with rustlers, hostile Indians, ornery weather, and deadly stampedes....

"Hewey Calloway, one of the best-loved cowboys in all of Western fiction, returns in this novel of his younger years as he and his beloved brother Walter leave the family farm in 1889 to find work in the West Texas cow country. The brothers are polar opposites. Walter pines for a sedate life as a farmer, with wife and children; Hewey is a fiddle-footed cowboy content to work at six bits--75 cents--a day on the Pecos River ranch owned by the penny-pinching...

It was spring on the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains of Texas, the time for the cattle drives to push north to the rail heads in Kansas. The "Lost Cause" of the South was still fresh in the mind of Southerners, including fifty-five-year-old Ben Albright, a pioneer of the Texas cattle drives, who was well familiar with the trail and its dangers -- he had successfully made five cattle drives from Texas to Kansas, but this spring will be his most difficult....

Noah Benton, a teenager with a great memory, a head for arithmetic, and dreams of excitement, is hired along with his older brother to help drive a herd of Texas longhorns to Abilene, Kansas. But Noah's trail boss happens to be John Wesley Hardin, a notorious killer who thinks Texas lawmen won't look for a fugitive in a crew of hardworking cowboys. After Hardin sees a profit in Noah's ability to count and memorize cards in gambling dens, Noah's dreams...

"Chancy Gantry and Ollie Teal are honest cowpunchers riding herd on fifteen hundred longhorns from Texas to Kansas. Their trail boss, Lucas Stout, is tough but fair. He's never lost a hand on a drive and doesn't aim to start now. So when a cowhand needs a sawbones bad, Stout sends Chancy and Ollie to escort the man to a town called Prosperity, which none of them has ever heard of. At first glance, the town looks deserted--bu tthe saloon is full. The...

The oldest and boldest O'Malley brother, Long John takes on the challenge of riding shotgun on a wagon train across the hostile Nebraska Territory. But the real test lies in the journey ahead--to the Rocky Mountains, Sante Fe, and home to Texas--with perils that will either make him a living legend or a dead one