When hard-traveling Tom Buchanan and his two-fisted saddle partner, Coco Bean, rode into El Paso, flush with the winnings from Coco's last prize fight, they found Ebenezar Shaw, an old friend and proprietor of the Grace Stage Line, in some mean trouble with a greedy big businessman and his hired desperadoes.Buchanan and Coco used their loot to keep Ebenezar's stage line from being grabbed up. Before long, however, Buchanan found himself high in the driver's seat of a hurtling stagecoach. He whipped his team through a crackling hail of bullets—and then went on to defend the spirit of home-grown enterprise from the back of a blazing gun!

The armed deputy prodded Buchanan out of the cell. 'We're taking care of scudders like you who try to buck the law. We're putting you on trial. A judge, a jury, the whole shebang.'And the whole shebang was a frame-up. The self-appointed judge was a madman, part-time sadistic sheriff and part-time lunatic preacher. And the jury he'd appointed was made up of doddering old men either too drunk or too deaf to hear the 'evidence.''You know what the jury's going to do to you?' the deputy sneered at Buchanan. 'That jury is going to hang you. Hang you by the neck.'

He was a tall son—taller than most men by a head, with a look of wildness in his battered, tough face.He was Tom Buchanan out of West Texas, who fought with joy and loved with gusto—who many times had gone to meet death without pause and with great good nature.This time he took on the whole of Agry County and the violent bandit clan that ran it. It was no fight of his—but a girl had been violated and a family's honor tarnished.So Buchanan settled his gunbelt and flexed his great hands and went surging into battle like a one-man troop of cavalry.And, by God, in the end there was left even to burn in Agrytown

It was hot enough to burn rawhide, and lizards were frying on flat rocks. It was, Buchanan decided, just about two degrees fiercer than hell, and if he could keep going for another half an hour he'd allow himself a drink from his canteen.He was in a mood for comfort, so naturally he got trouble.He came on the troop of cavalry conducting an army prison wagon, and in the wagon he discovered his old friend, the Apache chief, Sentos, with three of his braves. It was well over a hundred and twenty degrees in the wagon. "What happened, viejo?" Buchanan asked Sentos."I was stupid," the Apache said, "I trusted a blueleg warrior, and he betrayed my flag of white. Now they wish to hang me."Buchanan looked at the troopers and sighed. He couldn't let them hang a friend.

With his saddle partner, Coco Bean, Tom Buchanan rides into the middle of a brutal graze war between cattleman and sheep man. In the end, it's a little black sheep that helps Tom choose sides. And with Buchanan on your side odds make no never mind.

He stepped back and gazed at the tall, smiling man with wonderment. He had just seen him lick the most deadly gunslinger in the West with his bare lists."Where'd you come from?" he asked admiringly."No place in particular," Buchanan said."Is that a fact? And where you bound?""Same place." Buchanan laughed."You must like it there," the little rancher said."I like it best wherever I am," Buchanan replied gently.