Low-life wranglers like Rafe Yellen and his gang steered clear of Big Sam McKeller's Cyclone Ranch. Riding the old man's line looking for strays meant getting a face full of double-aught buck as sure as Texas was big. But now, with Ol' Sam gone and his soldier son Cale back from the Indian Wars to run the spread, the cow-hungry jaspers were back ... and aimin' to take over.
Outgunned and losing ground every day, it looks like young McKeller's done for until rawhide-tough frontiersman Wolfhunter Geddes ride in off the Staked Plains, offering his gun. Hellbent on settling an old score with yellen, the legendary gunslick cuts down the rustlers in a blaze of hot lead. But the trail of cold blood leads from one fight to another as McKeller learns that the price of Geddes' lightning-fast Colt could be his life!
1990 by Jason Manning Zebra Books (New York) 256 pp ISBN: 0-8217-2970-5
First of all, I have to say, in my own defense, I never wrote the cover text! Some of the elements for this novel were derived from the series of western short stories I wrote as a teenager (which will be published on this site as written, by the way.) The underlying theme is about what can happen when your back is to the wall and you're desperate enough to make a deal with the Devil. The Devil, in this case, being Wolfhunter. Who was not, I might add, a "gunslick.'