The fifty empty freights danced and rolled and rattled on the rough roadbed and filled Jericho Pass with thunder, the big engine was laboring and grunting at the grade, but five cars back the noise of the locomotive was lost. Yet there is a way to talk above the noise of a freight train just as there is a way to whistle into the teeth of a stiff wind. This freight-car talk is pitched just above the ordinary tone-it is an overtone of conversation,...

This sweeping tale captures the essence of Texas on a staggering scale as it chronicles the life and times of cattleman Jordan "Bick" Benedict, his naive young society wife, Leslie, and three generations of land-rich sons. A sensational story of power, love, cattle barons, and oil tycoons.

A man under thirty needs neighbors and to stop up the current of his life with a long silence is like obstructing a river-eventually the water either sweeps away the dam or rises over it, and the stronger the dam the more destructive is that final rush to freedom. Vic Gregg was on the danger side of thirty and he lived alone in the mountains all that winter. He wanted to marry Betty Neal, but marriage means money, therefore Vic contracted fifteen...

Pierre Ryder had been raised by a priest who hoped the boy would carry on his ministry in Canada, but one day the boy receives a letter from a father he never knew who is dying, shot by an infamous gunfighter, McGurk. Pierre rushes to his father's side, and as the new found parent dies, vows to find McGurk and beat the gunfighter at his own game.

Whistlin' Dan Berry is one of the most interesting characters in Western fiction. With uncanny abilities he controls a wild stallion, appropriately named Satan, and a ferocious wolf dog, Black Bart. Easy going, Berry proves absolutely unforgiving when physically assaulted by a feared, vicious outlaw, Jim Silent. Seemingly without any emotions, Whistlin' Dan is relentless in his vengeful search for Silent and his outlaw gang. The is the first book

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At the age of six Randall Byrne could name and bound every state in the Union and give the date of its admission; at nine he was conversant with Homeric Greek and Caesar; at twelve he read Aristophanes with perfect understanding of the allusions of the day and divided his leisure between Ovid and Horace; at fifteen, wearied by the simplicity of Old English and Thirteenth Century Italian, he dipped into the history of Philosophy and passed from that,...

It was high hot noon on the Casket Ridge. Its very scant shade was restricted to a few dwarf Scotch firs, and was so perpendicularly cast that Leonidas Boone, seeking shelter from the heat, was obliged to draw himself up under one of them, as if it were an umbrella. Occasionally, with a boy's perversity, he permitted one bared foot to protrude beyond the sharply marked shadow until the burning sun forced him to draw it in again with a thrill of satisfaction....

Kenneth Ward and his younger brother, Hal, spend their vacation on a forest preserve in Utah, where they accompany Ken's friend, Dick Leslie, a park ranger, as he culls mountain lions.

First published in 1899, this graphic depiction of urban American life centers around its title character, McTeague, a dentist practicing in San Francisco at the turn of the century. While at first content with his life and friendship with an ambitious man named Marcus, McTeague eventually courts and marries Trina, a frugal young woman who wins a large sum of money in a lottery. The greed of the majority of the characters in the novel creates a chain...

Hopalong Cassidy is an iconic western cowboy hero conceived by Clarence Mulford, but immortalized in a series of films starring William Boyd from 1935-1948. A tough-talking and violent character in the print novels, Cassidy was remade into a clean-cut hero who traveled the West with his sidekicks fighting villains who took advantage of the weak. Clarence E Mulford takes you back to the beginning by relating the stories (as told to him by Red and the...