Max Brand

When Harry French left home he was just another kid looking to make his way. But when he came back four years later, things were different. He was different. Or at least the town thought so. Now nobody looked him in the eye. Conversation stopped when he walked into a room. Even his old friends were afraid of him. He wasn't just Harry anymore... now he was the Shifter, a gun-fighter who brought trouble with him wherever he went. And as hard as Harry...

On a cold, gusty night in Circle City, Alaska, Sammy Day walks into Nagle's Bar. He is only twenty-two, but he has been on his own for ten years. He has worked cattle from Montana to Chihuahua, but a little "accident" at a poker table in Montana sent him on a forced march to Alaska to avoid a posse. He is down to his last fifty cents.

Al is a fiddle foot. In fact, he has been riding the rails, and when he jumps off from the blind baggage of a passenger train just before it passes the railroad yards outside Jumping Creek, two railroad detectives use fists to subdue him before putting him in Sheriff Timothy Drayton's jail. Paradise Al looks like a Pendleton, the powerful local clan that is feuding with the Draytons. That resemblance, with a little help from Al, is enough to get him...