Frank Carlson Library

Will Dryden, the main character of Trouble at the Redstone, is well equipped with the ability to fight with his fists and with his six-guns. Like other traditional western heroes, he also gets thumped once in a while and has a knack for getting gonad-driven bad guys to want to kill him.

Russell Archer has come to Wyoming to fulfill his dream of having his own land. After working for one season on Lidge Mercer's ranch, Mercer offers to make him a junior partner. Before long, however, Archer learns that Mercer may need a bodyguard more than a partner. Then Mercer is found dead, and Archer feels an obligation to solve the crime. Now the real difficulties set in, as the killers come for Archer and his sweetheart, Kate, one at a time....

A stranger named Dunbar comes to the town of Dry Camp and goes to work at Rich Stanton's ranch. Shortly after Dunbar's arrival, he helps find the body of an old man named Ross Guilford. The foreman, Paul Kelso, picks a fight with a ranch hand named Willard Brumley. Dunbar intervenes, and Kelso fires him. As Dunbar asks around, he learns from Jack Brumley, Willard's father, that Guilford knew something about Brumley's wife, Louise, a beautiful woman...

"Reese Hartley has come to Wyoming to settle on his own land. But his cattleman boss expects his hired men to turn their homestead claims over to him. Hartley resists and is let go. He meets a woman named Muriel. She has come west to look for land, but her cousins want to exploit her. A cowboy is found dead on the range, and an underage female cousin of Muriel is found dead. This girl, Nancy, has a history of flirting, and suspicion falls on Hartley....

Dunbar, working on a ranch in the Niobrara country in Wyoming, connects the death of a hardscrabble homesteader with the death of an old horse trader some fifteen years earlier. As Dunbar goes to work on a corral project in town and then on fall roundup, more murders take place--a wandering drunk who has picked up gossip in an alehouse, and then the proprietor of the alehouse. People who know too much are being silenced. An old woman named Verona...

"Seventeen-year-old Wilsey Grant is on his own when he meets a traveler on foot. The two arrive in the town of Silver Grass, where the other man finds work washing dishes. Wilsey goes out to look for work and meets an indentured servant girl, an orphan like himself. Before long, the fellow traveler turns up dead. Wilsey goes to work at the nearby Emerald Peaks Ranch, where he hears of ranch hands terrorizing the settlers, and he witnesses the shooting...