Scratch Morton and Bo Creel, two aging cowpokes and friends for years, have seen their share of cattle drives, shootouts, and bust-ups. They do their best to stay on the right side of the law, and never go looking for trouble, but it seems to find them just the same. In Arizona Territory, they get stuck in the midst of a battle between competing stagecoach lines. Of course, a pretty woman who happens to own one of the lines has a lot to do with it, and things aren't quite what they seem.

To the Apaches, Daniella Blackwood was an adopted daughter, respected and cherished. To their shaman, the bold white streak in her hair made her special and her visions in the flames make her a woman of magic. Yet no magic could protect Daniella from the passion that sears her senses when she first meets Travis Colton.

In the beginning, the gods destroyed the world. Five hundred years later, things haven’t gotten much better for humans. The demigods that were left behind to guard over humanity have been using them as fodder for an endless civil war between themselves, and the humans just go on dutifully slaughtering each other, battle after battle. It’s not all bad, though. Perry McGown makes his living off those bloody, stinking battlefields. He works on a crew that reclaims all the spent shell casings. But if anyone found out that he was a deserter from the war, he’d be executed for heresy.

Almena Guillory, better known as the Grizzly Queen of the West, has plenty to recommend her for the noose, but US Marshal Apostle Richardson enforces the law, he doesn't decide it. When a posse tries to lynch Almena ahead of her trial, Apostle refuses their form of expedited justice - and receives a bullet for his trouble. Before escaping, however, Almena unexpectedly saves his life by absorbing his wound through the use of dangerous flesh magic.

Ten years after the collapse, Huxley has built a good life again. He has a loving wife, a farm with fields of golden barley, and a daughter with a strange and wonderful gift. Then the slavers come. Working out in the fields during the attack, Huxley returns too late. His daughter has been taken, and his wife is bleeding out, her last whispered words about a man with a scorpion tattoo on his neck. Where do the slavers go? Huxley has no idea. He knows only that they head east, and so will he, setting out on foot across the desert of the Wastelands.

Half Apache and all man, Jake Redman was more than a match for the wild Arizona Territory. Sarah Conway, on the other hand, was an Eastern lady who belonged anywhere else but on the rugged land Jake loved. But beneath Sarah's ladylike demeanor beat the heart of a true pioneer, a woman he yearned to make his own.

In the first in this trio of Western stories by Louis L'Amour - "Black Rock" - Jim Gatlin, a Texas trail driver, arrives in the town of Tucker where he finds himself quickly drawn into the middle of an all-out battle for the XY Ranch when, due to a case of mistaken identity, he kills the segundo of Wing Cary's Flying C Ranch. Gatlin is a dead-ringer for Jim Walker, who, like Cary, wants control of the XY. Gatlin is thrown into a situation in which all he can do but fight for his life.

Earl Brannock was a gambling man who fled the fires of the Civil War and found a boomtown called Denver - in a land being built on dreams, luck, and gold. Virgil Brannock joined him next, fresh from Lee's surrender at Appomattox, determined to rise to the top of the frontier's rough and treacherous business world. Finally, Clint came riding a trail of revenge: a fiery young Brannock who dared to wear a badge.... The three brothers were reunited once again.

After spending an unknown number of days caged, chained, and tortured by men wearing hoods in the darkness of a root cellar who insist he robbed a bank and killed several women, 25-year-old Ben Hawthorne is rescued by four men. But who are these men and why were they looking for him - the son of Eli and Cora Hawthorne, born on a ranch outside of Nacogdoches, Texas, orphaned at 10 when his parents were killed by Comanches, and then taken by the Comanches who gave him his Indian name, Newcomer?

He began his life as a slave. During the Civil War he escaped and lived among the Indians in the Oklahoma Territories. He learned to ride, shoot and track prey from his adopted people. When the war ended, he was recruited as one of the first black marshals in the history of the west.

Black Jack Haley and his band of outlaws spent a lot of time in the town of Blue Water. Drinking, gambling, and keeping company with saloon girls, even the fact that retired Texas Ranger Arthur Ray lived nearby did nothing to discourage Black Jack and his boys from spending their time and stolen money in the small western town.

After a lifetime of robbing banks and holding up trains, Jimmy "Slash" Braddock and Melvin "Pecos Kid" Baker are ready to call it quits, though not completely by choice. Sold out by their old gang, they have to bust out of jail and pull one last job to finance their early retirement. The target is a rancher's payroll train. Catch is: the train is carrying a Gatling gun and 20 deputy US marshals who know they're coming. Caught and quickly sentenced to hang, their old enemy - the wheelchair-bound, bucket of mean, Marshal L. C. Bledsoe - shows up at the last minute to spare their lives.

The lifeless bodies of Texas Rangers lay scattered on the floor of Bryant’s Gap. One man, wounded and left for the buzzards, comes back to consciousness and vows to bring the killers to justice. Now known only as the Lone Ranger, this man, his steadfast horse, Silver, and trusted friend, Tonto, set out to bring justice to the men who ambushed him and his fellow rangers.

Six outlaws, barely a day ahead of their pursuers, find shelter in a freshly deserted New Mexico town. With no water, and one of them gravely wounded, they realize too late they're trapped inside the lifeless town. As they soon discover the grisly truth behind the disappearance of the townsfolk, the outlaws find themselves hunted by something far worse than anything they've faced yet - an unspeakable evil that seemingly cannot be killed.

A deal goes bad...and Van Delano is left to die in the desert. But most folk say he’s been cursed with a double-barreled shotgun of mulishness. So, when his first attempt at bargaining for his kidnapped sister’s freedom lands him with a dead horse, a bullet in his leg, and miles of desert between him and the nearest town, he’s not about to give up. He’ll fight and claw, cheat and steal, even kill, if he has to.