The Medicine-man

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Bud Daley has wagered everything on a dream of respectability, only to watch his Triangle D herd vanish and leave him buried under debt to the powerful Cleve Lavelle. On the porch of his modest ranch house, with his wife May trying to hold the family together and Uncle Jimmy Miller and foreman Sody Slavin trading their usual comic barbs, Bud's ruin comes into sharp focus: he borrowed, gambled, built a herd, and lost it all to rustlers on the Modoc range. But the missing cattle are only the beginning. In a county where Lavelle's influence reaches from cattle to politics and Sheriff Dug Breed offers little trust or help, Bud is trapped between frontier law, personal grudges, and his own pride. A night of drinking with Sody and Dinah Blewette turns rowdy and dangerous, ending in a brawl that puts Breed on the wrong side of the fight. Soon Bud is overhearing a stranger with May, riding off in shame, and vanishing into the moonlit hills. As gunfire, a wounded man named Red Blair, and a trail leading toward Black Wells pull Hashknife and Sleepy into the search, the mystery deepens. Old loyalties, hard luck, and hidden motives collide in a rugged western tale of debt, betrayal, and a man desperate to prove himself before he loses everything.