When three people need to leave Virginia City, they face a jarring stagecoach ride across the plains toward Salt Lake through an area infested with ruthless road agents.

Barnaby Skye, a deserter from the Royal Navy, takes a second wife at the urging of his Crow Indian wife, and agrees to act as a guide for a wealthy Englishman hoping to explore the Yellowstone and Missouri River valleys.

Collected here for the first time are all the Western short stories of Richard S. Wheeler, winner of four Spur Awards and the Owen Wister Award for his lifetime achievement in the world of Western literature by the Western Writers of America, with a cast of vividly drawn characters including madams, miners, morticians, detectives, newsmen, and lawmen.

During a trip back to the village of his Crow wife, Victoria, she is abducted by a deadly band of Blackfeet, and Skye must risk his life to rescue her, following a trail that takes him back to Canada, where he is still wanted by the British Navy for deserting his ship, four years ago.

It is 1832, six years after he deserted the Royal Navy, when Barnaby Skye has a chance to return to England to clear his name and take up employment with the Hudson's Bay Company. But "Mister Skye," as he insists on being called, is as much a magnet for trouble as he is a legend among mountain men, and this opportunity of a lifetime begins to disintegrate almost from the moment it is presented to him. With his devoted Crow wife, Victoria, an eccentric...

"The tale of Gladstone Brass, a solitary prospector in the Nevada desert, and the people who cross his path"--

August Beausoleil and his colleague, Charles Pomerantz, have taken the Beausoleil Brothers Follies to the remote mining towns of Montana, far from the powerful impresarios who own the talent and control the theaters on the big vaudeville circuits. Their cast includes a collection of has-beens and second-tier performers: Mary Mabel Markey, once queen of the boards but now a little out of breath; Wayne Windsor, "The Profile," who favors his audiences...

In 1870, mountain man Barnaby Skye, noticing the landscape changing from the slaughtering of buffalo and the government's relocation of tribes to reservations and despite the hesitation of his two Native American wives, decides it is time for a change.

While there were some initial suspicions about Sam Stop's background, people came to respect and then trust the reclusive founder of Pony, Montana's local bank.

Barnaby Skye, the most durable and unforgettable character in modern Western fiction, returns in this harrowing tale of survival from his early years in the Rockies. In the midst of a brutal winter, Skye's beloved Crow Indian wife, Victoria, is critically wounded when a Blackfeet raiding party attacks a Crow hunting camp. Despite Skye's attempts at doctoring, Victoria's life hangs in the balance as the two, left alone in the frozen wilderness, struggle...