Doc Holt listened to the boys at the other end of the bunkhouse as they joked about the night’s excitement, and he felt sick. What they were doing bothered him. Why they were doing it bothered him. But most of all, why he wasn’t doing anything to stop it bothered him.

Virgil Scott and his best friend Roy Sheffield left their horse ranch and were making one of their routine runs to Denver to deliver 32 horses. But the short trail drive proved to be anything but routine when late that first night, they were set upon by men wielding deadly clubs.

Sixteen-year-old Henry was ejected from the enormous St. Martin ranch and told never to return, or he would be shot on sight. He vowed to return and seek revenge against the entire family. When he finally returned, it wouldn’t be as Henry St. Martin, it would not be as a 16-year-old boy seeking justice for his mother, but as a hardened lawman with the name of Alex Paine.

Max could fix anything that had moving parts., but he couldn't fix what sent him to prison for five years. Now, he was back home and had to fix a lot more than machines, and found it was almost impossible to repair people that didn’t want to be fixed.

Will noticed that the numbers didn't add up when he was 11, but he didn't discover the truth of that mathematical problem until he was 17. For most of his young life, Will had known Pearl as his older sister, but only after the man who had acted as his father died did he learn that she was really his mother.

After the final battle of the Civil War, Confederate Sergeant Travis Kane rode his Yankee horse away from Palmito Ranch to return to his ranch in Uvalde County. As he began the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile ride across West Texas, Travis was grateful for surviving the long, bloody war without being wounded. But now that the fighting was over, his biggest concern was for his young wife because he hadn’t received a letter from Lillian in almost two years.

Sheriff Joe Brooks was talking to a young prisoner who gave him some incredibly bad news. Three notorious gangs of outlaws had merged into one large band big enough to take over entire towns in his sparsely populated county. It was when they began to terrorize his county that he had to act, and he’d have to take them on alone.

Joey couldn’t imagine a better 13th birthday. He’d been given his first pistol and now was going to join his six older brothers on tomorrow’s job. They were going to trust him with covering their escape after robbing the bank and he was determined to do it right. He was immensely proud to be a Hogan, and his tough brothers were his heroes.

Kyle MacKenzie left Fort Omaha to head to do some scouting at Fort Sully in the Dakota Territory at the request of their new commander. He’d been riding west for a few hours with his packhorse in tow when he noticed a set of wagon tracks heading northwest that appeared to be just a couple of days old. It raised his curiosity, and as the tracks were going in the direction he was headed anyway, he followed.

Luke Scott just needed to track down some rustlers.The biggest question he had as he rode form his ranch was what kind of idiot rustles cattle in Colorado in December? Three hours later, as he tried to find his way to safety in a howling blizzard, just staying alive was much more important. It was what he found when seeking emergency shelter that would alter his life forever.

Joe had been the last child chosen. An entire trainload of children heading west had already been chosen, including his sister and his two friends. They had been the final four children on the train and made a pact to meet 10 years later when they were all adults. The 10 years were over. Joe would finally be reunited with his sister and his friends, including his girlfriend when he was 11.

After leaving his job as sheriff of Boulder, Sam Brown decides to visit his sister and her family on their ranch south of Denver, but discovers them all gone. He searches to find them, and what he discovers becomes his mission.

The upcoming eclipse was anxiously awaited by Clay Jeffries as he prepared a private observatory on the plateau above his father's ranch near Rawlins in Wyoming territory. Then, he received a visitor with an unusual request. The stranger asked the ex-professor if he would tutor his frumpy but brilliant daughter in astronomy. Clay reluctantly agreed, but only if she proved to be an exceptional student. While the young girl surely proved to be both brilliant and frumpy, her arrival also brought with it many potentially deadly consequences that neither she nor her father realized.

Susanna stared at her father’s body on the floor, his life’s blood still pooling near his head. She’d murdered her own father, and even as she stepped slowly away from the horror, knew that there was more terror in her future. Soon, a man with a badge would come through that door, arrest her, and then they’d slide a black hood over her head, and she’d plunge into cold darkness before her receiving her final, eternal sentence.

After twenty years of fighting; first the rebels and then the Apaches, Jonas was tired of it all and decided to return to his unfinished cabin to find the solace and peace that he craved. Yet once he’d returned the place to a livable condition, he realized that life wasn’t just about existing. He missed the camaraderie of the soldiers and he really wasn’t cut out for the life of a hermit. So, Jonas decided to return to his duties as an army scout at Fort Selden. The cabin would still be waiting for him when he was ready.

Harry Glenn was asked to investigate the open and shut case of the murder of a prominent judge in Topeka, but he quickly realized that the crime was far from simple and wouldn’t be that simple to close, either.

Sheriff Jed Morgan thinks his life is about to get a lot quieter when he gets voted out of office in a bought-and-paid for election rigged by his family’s long-time nemesis Arnie Williams. But when the new railroad comes to town and Jed’s neighbors, the Crawfords at the Bar C ranch, have their water poisoned and Arnie Williams’ hands try to stampede their cattle, Jed begins to find that his lawman days were far from over.

He never looked back as he made his way through the gaslit streets without a penny in his pockets and no place to sleep. He should have been crushed by his desperation, but it was his anger and hate that drove him. He would use the one skill he had learned in those empty years that he now left behind him. He would enter the world of bareknuckle fighting and have to face older, stronger men to make his way in this hard world. He may be nothing, but he wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

Captain Stan Murray was finally being mustered out of the army after all of the administrative snafus that had left him in Montana Territory long after the conclusion of the War Between the States. As he began his long journey, he wasn’t going home to Michigan. He had to cross hundreds of miles of hostile Indian Territory to reach Cheyenne City in Wyoming Territory to try and find the girl that he hadn’t seen in almost ten years. She was probably married and had three children by now, but he knew he had to at least know.

Mattie Foster had made a terrible mistake. She had left Missouri and come to Green River, Wyoming to find her father; a father who was not the man that she even knew. Now, she was being held by two men against her will. The man who was determined to find her was a rancher. A rancher with a debt to repay.

Doc Holt listened to the boys at the other end of the bunkhouse as they joked about the night’s excitement, and he felt sick. What they were doing bothered him. Why they were doing it bothered him. But most of all, why he wasn’t doing anything to stop it bothered him.

Private Jake Elliott was apprehensive as he walked to the commander’s office. He couldn’t think of a single transgression that would have attracted the major’s attention. When he left the command building 10 minutes later, he was still numbed by the short visit. Tomorrow, he would no longer be a cavalryman, but would be returning to the family ranch outside of Fort Benton in Montana Territory. But it was the reason he was being discharged before his enlistment expired that had been the biggest shock.

Eighteen-year-old Garrett Shaw and his father spotted the rustlers and pulled their Winchesters. They kept their muzzles pointed away from the three men who were stealing eight steers from their small ranch to give them a chance to leave peaceably. When they started throwing lead, Garrett and his father began returning fire. Garrett hit one of the rustlers just as his father’s horse went down. Hours later, as the doctor examined his father’s injury, Garrett knew that it was now his responsibility to provide for his crippled father, mother, and sisters.

Morgan was meeting with an important client in his well-appointed law office in San Antonio when his clerk tapped on the door and entered without waiting for a reply. Morgan didn’t mind as he expected Jim Cooper had a good reason for the interruption.

No one had seen the innocuous rock on the long climb to the pass on the Oregon Trail, and when the last covered wagon in the long line rolled onto the lump of granite, it shouldn’t have made much of a difference, but it caused almost instant tragedy. Just seconds later, the wagon plunged over the edge of the narrow trail, then began its deadly, tumbling roll into the abyss, spewing its contents as it fell to its destruction. Her precious children had been trapped inside, and Rebecca could only watch in horror. Her children had been her life, and now she had nothing.