Librarian note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
Frank Gruber was an enormously prolific author of pulp fiction. A stalwart contributor to Black Mask magazine, he also wrote novels, producing as many as four a year during the 1940s. His best-known character was Oliver Quade, “the Human Encyclopedia,” whose adventures were collected in Brass Knuckles (1966), and will soon be republished in ebook format as Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia,featuring brand-new material, from MysteriousPress.com, Open Road Integrated Media, and Black Mask magazine.
Jim Dancer has an undeserved reputation because he rode with Quantrill during the Civil War. Killed a hundred men, robbed fifty banks, Jesse James' lieutenant. None of it was true.
He'd been arrested by George Cummings of a detective agency out of Chicago and hired to bring him in. When an attempt to cross a flood swollen river on a ferry goes awry, capsizing when the horse got frightened(and Cummings being kicked in the head by a horse, Dancer seizes the chance afforded him. When a stage finds him handcuffed to Cummings' body the next morning, he identifies the dead man as dancer and himself as Cummings. He resigns at a satellite office where they don't know Cummings and takes a job laying track for a railroad in Kansas.
The job ends at Lanyard and Dancer goes into town where he rescues a young woman being manhandled by a drunken Texan, killing him in the gun fight he's pressed into.
That little indiscretion causes him to end up as town Marshall before he learns something important: the young woman he rescued was the daughter of the man he'd shot down in Lawrence nine years before and the owner of the town was the dead man's brother.
Never mind that the little weasel that had started it all was also in town and "remember you from somewhere."