Ray Hogan

To a man like Cole Dagget, eight hundred dollars meant a lot of hard hours in the saddle - and just enough to return to Texas, settle down and get married. So when the money was stolen from him in a small-town holdup, there was no way he was going to let the robbers just ride off with it. And he wasn't about to wait for the people of Solitude to form a posse. Riding out alone, Cole couldn't guess that when the posse caught up they would mistake him...

Dan Ragan has a reputation as a gunman who won't go out of his way to avoid trouble. Years ago, a woman had chosen gambler Colby Strickland over Ragan, and when he learned that she was being brutalized, Ragan shot and killed Strickland. The law declared it self-defense, but that's not good enough for young Jody Strickland, who is determined to avenge his father's murder. Ragan knows that Jody is no match for him, so he's heading to the Mexican border...

Jim Strike and his partner Arlie Silvershell aim to carve a ranch out of the lush Tenkiller country of southern New Mexico, but the odds were against them--and so was Silvershell's haughty, ruthless wife.

"He said his name was John Rutledge, and it had all started out as a simple favor - the return of a body to the ranch where the dead man had once been employed. But the circumstances of the killing - a cold-blooded gun-down - and the ominous parting words of the dead man's buddy made Rutledge wonder if there were going to be more serious consequences to his good deed than he had bargained for. By the time he got to the ranch and found Hetty Judson...