When Emma Switzer's Amish family is robbed on a trip to visit relatives, they pray to the Lord for someone to help; cowboy Luke Carson literally lands at Emma's feet, but he's not exactly what the family had in mind as an answer to their prayers.

Dewey 'Mac' Mackenzie is a marked man on the run who works as a chuckwagon cook on cattle drives to stay one step ahead of his enemies. When he defends a saloon girl from the unwanted advances of some local toughs, he earns the wrath of Oscar Harcourt, who rules the town of Harcourt City with an iron fist and a gang of thugs.

When a cattle drive turns deadly, Smoke and Matt Jensen and Duff MacCallister struggle to cope with bloodthirsty Indians and trigger-happy rustlers as they ride into a brutal blizzard that sorely tests their skills of survival.

"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...

Softspoken cowboy Tom Chantry is forced into an uneasy alliance with ruthless gunslinger French Williams as the two join forces to drive a herd of cattle north to Dodge.

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....

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....

"Once every year, Perley Gates and his brothers lead the Triple-G crew on its annual cattle drive. It's a treacherous journey along the Great Western Trail, with a herd of two-thousand cows on one side and many opportunities for trouble on the other. This year, trouble shows up in the form of a beautiful young woman, her little baby, and her bizarre traveling companion--a colorful old cuss who goes by the name of Possom Smith. They're heading to a...

"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...