Golden Gunmen: A Western Sextet

by Louis L'Amour

From the master of Western storytelling comes a collection of six action-packed tales sure to please Louis L’Amour’s legion of fans. In “Trap of Gold,” Wetherton has been three months out of Horsehead when he finds his first color in a crumbling granite upthrust. The granite is slashed with a vein of quartz that is literally laced with gold! The problem is that the granite upthrust is unstable, and taking out the quartz might just bring the whole thing tumbling down. In “Keep Travelin’, Rider,” Tack Gentry has been away for a year when he returns to the familiar buildings of his uncle’s G Bar ranch. To his amazement, the ranch has a new owner, who is unimpressed when Tack explains that his uncle was a Quaker who never carried a gun. His advice to Tack is to make tracks—but Tack has other plans. In “Big Medicine,” old Billy Dunbar has discovered the best gold-bearing gravel he’s seen in a year—but a small band of Apaches may ruin his day. If they notice him, he’ll need a good plan to get out alive. In “Trail to Pie Town,” Dusty Barron rides at full gallop out of town. Behind him a man lies bleeding on the floor of a saloon. Dan Hickman had called him yellow and gone for a gun, but Dan was a mite slow. The dead man has relatives in the area, and now it looks like Dusty is going to be facing a clan war. In “McQueen of the Tumbling K,” Ward McQueen is foreman at the Tumbling K Ranch. He finds traces of a man, apparently wounded, who has sought shelter in the hinterlands of the ranch but is unable to locate him. When McQueen rides into town, he is shot down and left for dead. But the gunmen made a critical mistake, because McQueen is not dead—and he’s looking to get even. In “Dutchman’s Flat,” it all seemed a simple matter to the six men in the posse. A squatter named Lock gunned down Johnny Webb, and once they catch him, there isn’t going to be a trial. But as the posse heads out after him, it becomes clear that Lock knows the desert better than they do, and he knows how to pick them off one by one.

Genres: Westerns

119 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 1, 2016

About the author

Louis Dearborn L'Amour was an American novelist and short story writer. His books consisted primarily of Western novels, though he called his work "frontier stories". His most widely known Western fiction works include Last of the Breed, Hondo, Shalako, and the Sackett series. L'Amour also wrote historical fiction (The Walking Drum), science fiction (The Haunted Mesa), non-fiction (Frontier), and poetry and short-story collections. Many of his stories were made into films. His books remain popular and most have gone through multiple printings. At the time of his death, almost all of his 105 existing works (89 novels, 14 short-story collections, and two full-length works of nonfiction) were still in print, and he was "one of the world's most popular writers".

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

You might need to be a Louis L'Amour fan, but I thought this was a good collection of short stories. I'm not sure the editor agrees...in his introduction he didn't seem very appreciative of L'Amour's work. Seems a shame that a man can make money off another man's work at the same time that he denigrates his work to others.

I've read most of these stories elsewhere, some of them many times, but L"Amour never disappoints me.

[Edwina Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book. It is a western. I enjoyed it so much. It is clean. It has violence in it.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of Louis L'Amour's early short stories which he wrote for the pulp magazines.

[Ian Enticott]

Classic L'Amour.