Book Catalog
A Little Girl in Tears
In a rain-swept city night, a comfortable man’s search for excitement leads him far beyond diversion and into a world of poverty, sorrow, and unexpected human grace. What begins as a flirtation with danger becomes a poignant encounter with lives balanced between desperation and hope. Ellis Parker Butler crafts a finely observed tale of chance, conscience, and the startling distance between privilege and suffering.
The Three Wise Men
In the dusty, half-forgotten desert town of Calent, three local officials—a marshal, a mayor, and a judge—convene their regular poker game above an abandoned saloon, where civic business is conducted between hands of cards and sips of bootleg whiskey. When word reaches them that Peg Nell, a reformed woman they once permitted to stay in town on the promise she would go straight, has lost her job at the Greek restaurant, the three wise men must weigh gossip against judgment. A visit from the town's oiliest busybody turns the quiet card game into an unspoken reckoning. Ernest Haycox's sly, understated western sketch reveals how justice in a frontier town can wear the face of friendship, and how decency often speaks in the fewest words.
Magpie's Night-Bear
In the rugged hills of Western Montana, two prospecting partners settle into a rough cabin with little more than grit, a phonograph, and a talent for trouble. When an unexpected midnight visitor shatters their uneasy peace, tall-tale humor and frontier chaos collide in classic Western fashion. W. C. Tuttle’s “Magpie’s Night-Bear” blends comic suspense, rustic dialect, and early twentieth-century adventure storytelling in a lively tale of wilderness misadventure.
More Than Skin Deep
In a quiet mountain town, a shattered safe, a stolen fortune, and a dead clerk send the community into panic. As a celebrated city detective arrives with modern methods and bold conclusions, the unassuming local constable, Dad Anderson, relies on patience, common sense, and his understanding of human character. Erle Stanley Gardner’s “More Than Skin Deep” is a sharply drawn small-town mystery that contrasts forensic certainty with old-fashioned judgment.
Helped by a Horse Doctor
In the rough-and-tumble frontier town of Piperock, cowpoke Ike Harper finds his partner Magpie Simpkins tangled up with a traveling stranger and a get-rich-quick scheme involving a dubious fraternal order called the Loyal Legion of Lizards. What begins with a bent gun barrel and a busted skull soon spirals into a wild chain of misadventures featuring secret handshakes, life-insurance pitches sold under gunfire, a quick-thinking horse doctor, and a goat with ambitions of its own. Equal parts tall tale and slapstick farce, W. C. Tuttle's yarn captures the drawl, grit, and gleeful absurdity of the Old West at its most ornery. A rollicking comedic Western first published in the pages of Adventure magazine, this Piperock story stands as a classic of pulp-era frontier humor.