When Love's Labor's Lost

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Piperock is a town where common sense regularly loses to a good idea gone bad. When Magpie Simpkins proposes a Labor Day spectacle pitting an African lion against the fearsome bull Calamity, the whole frontier starts talking, betting, and blundering its way toward disaster. Narrated by the dry, skeptical Ike, this lively Western comedy follows a chain of absurd schemes: a lion is to be bought from a circus, raffle money is raised, and even the preacher is tempted to watch the mayhem from a front-row seat. But the plan quickly veers into farce as Ike, Dirty Shirt Jones, and Whiskers get mixed up with the wrong animal, a drunken bargain, and a storm that turns a bad purchase into a river-borne nightmare. By the time the town's arena is packed and the doors open, the crowd's appetite for excitement collides with pure chaos, sending men, bull, lion, and bystanders hurtling through Piperock in a riot of dust, splinters, bluff, and comic near-death. It's a sharp, rough-hewn satire of frontier pride, public spirit, and betting fever.