TEXAS SHOWDOWN

Publisher: Forge Books (March 20, 2007)

Elmer Kelton writes of his beloved home country of West Texas in these two novels of cowmen and cow country. In Pecos Crossing, two young cowboys, Johnny Fristo and Speck Quitman, have been cheated of six months hard-earned salary by their rancher boss Larramore and intend to get what is due to them.

In Shotgun, rancher Blair Bishop has to contend with a rival cowman who is turning his herd loose on Bishops land, and with a mean customer named Macy Modock, who Bishop sent to prison ten years past. Modock is out of the hoosegow and has returned to Two Forks, determined to get even with the man who sent him up the river.

BRUSH COUNTRY: TWO TEXAS NOVELS

Forge Books (January 24, 2006)

In Barbed Wire, the first novel in this Kelton omnibus, Irishman Doug Monahan runs a fencing crew outside the south Texas town of Twin Wells. The onetime cowboy has found work digging post-holes and stringing barbed wire for ranchers as protection against wandering stock, rustlers, and land-hungry thugs. Monahans fencing operation is opposed by Captain Andrew Rinehart, a former Confederate officer and an old-school open range baron of the huge R Cross spread. With his brutal foreman, Archer Spann, assigned the violent work, Rinehart wages a barbed wire war against Doug Monahan.

The second colorful tale of the brush country of south Texas is Llano River. Dundee, a onetime cowboy (one of Monahans fencing crew in Barbed Wire) wanders into the town of Titusville broke, tired, and itching for a fight. He takes a job from town patriarch John Titus to find out who is rustling Tituss cattle but learns there is more to the job than detective work. Its not enough for Dundee to find the stolen cows, John Titus wants to blame the thievery on a specific personBlue Roan Hardesty, a onetime friend turned sworn enemy of the powerful Titus clan. What Dundee uncovers creates a shooting war out of a simmering feudwith him in the middle. This omnibus brings together two of Elmer Keltons scarce Texas novels of the 1960s, stories that exemplify why he is the most honored of all Western writers.

SIX BITS A DAY

Forge Books (October 3, 2006)

Hewey Calloway, the best-loved cowboy in all of Western fiction, returns in this novel of his younger years as he and his beloved brother Walter leave the family farm in 1889 to find work in the West Texas cow country.The brothers are polar opposites. Walter pines for a sedate life as a farmer, with wife and children; Hewey is a fiddle-footed cowboy content to work at six bits--75 cents--a day on the Pecos River ranch owned by the penny-pinching C.C. Tarpley. Hewey, who "usually accepted the vagaries of life without getting his underwear in a twist", is fun-loving and whiskey-drinking. He spends every penny he earns and regularly gets into trouble with his boss--and occasionally with the law--often dragging innocent Walter along.When Walter falls in love with a boarding house girl and begins dreaming of a farmer's life, Hewey jumps at the chance to rescue him from this fate worse than death. He convinces Walter to join him on a mission for Tarpley, driving 600 head of cattle from beyond San Antonio to the Double-C ranch on the Pecos.The journey is both memorable and dangerous: a murderous outlaw is searching for Hewey; and another ruthless character is determined to sabotage the cattle drive. When the drovers reach the Pecos they find Boss Tarpley in the midst of a vicious range feud with Eli Jessup, a neighboring cowman. Hewey and his brother Walter have to get the herd safely across Jessup's land-but how?

SONS OF TEXAS

Forge Books (May 12, 2005)

In 1816, Mordecai Lewis, a veteran of Andrew Jackson's Indian campaigns and battles against the British, moves his family into the western Tennessee canebrakes. But Mordecai, a born wanderer, is not satisfied with farming, and with his sons Michael and Andrew and some other backwoodsmen, he leads a foray into Spanish-held Texas to hunt wild horses and return the mustang herd to sell in Tennessee.