Pirates from Piperock

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Horse Heaven is a rattlesnake-bitten mining camp where saloons, gamblers, undertakers, and gunmen crowd a hill built on greed and bad temper. Into this raucous Western comedy come Ike Harper and Dirty Shirt Jones, trading boastful jokes, empty-gun bravado, and pirate-style swagger as they navigate a town where no real marshal exists, prisoners are simply kicked off the bluff, and even funeral business feels like a frontier racket. As they meet the grimly comic "scientist" Solemn Sales, the sharp-tongued undertaker Tombstone Taylor, and the exasperated storekeeper Bull Burgoyne, the town erupts into a frenzy of bullets, dynamite, collapsing buildings, and mock justice. A poet-gunman leaves verse on the wall under fire, rival gunmen posture and bicker, and saloons like the Queen of Spades and Ten of Hearts are blown apart one by one. Through slapstick violence, mock-heroic language, and satirical frontier wit, the story turns Horse Heaven into a hilarious monument to lawlessness, masculine bluster, and the absurdity of a place where everybody hates everybody else—until the whole town is reduced to "GONE HENCE."