The Western Short Story MEGAPACK(R)

Ride the dusty trails of the Old West in eighteen hard-riding tales pulled from the golden age of the pulps. Gunfighters, cowpunchers, pony express riders, prospectors, and range-war veterans come alive on every page, their fortunes turning on a sudden draw, a cold camp, or a glance across a crowded saloon.

From a drifter "on the dodge" running one jump ahead of the law, to a lonely rider strung out across the sage on a killing errand, these stories capture the frontier as readers first met it-vivid, violent, and honest about the cost of survival. Rustlers circle the herd by moonlight. A greenhorn learns that courage and a six-shooter don't always travel together. Old feuds ripen into gunsmoke beneath a pitiless sun.

Included are:

• "Sixteen to One on Friday," by W.C. Tuttle
• "Gold," by Burt Leslie
• "Bound South," by Ernest Haycox
• "On the Dodge," by Will James
• "Conversation," by J. Frank Davis
• "The Man from Oregon," by Mary B. Arbuckle
• "Old Slowpoke," by Howard E. Morgan
• "The old 'Yaller' Shirt," by Ray Humphreys
• "War Paint," by Robert Winchester
• "The Bar Act," by Bud La Mar
• "A Perfect Gentleman," by Mark Price
• "Mountain Killers," by Thomas Barclay Thomson
• "Empty Bottles," by Raymond S. Spears
• "Gun play," by Michael J. Phillips
• "The Man Who Hated Himself," by Walt Coburn
• "The Pony Express Rider," by Earl C. McCain
• "Where the West begins," by Austin Hall
• "The Strike at Too Dry," by Willis Brindley

Collected here for the first time, these adventure yarns deliver the real pulp-era West: lean prose, bigger- than-life heroes, and a horizon that always seems one more ridge away.