“The Colonel’s Lady” by Elmore Leonard

Learning to fight doesn’t come easy with most men. Learning to fight the Apache doesn’t come easy to anyone. You watch the veteran until your face takes on the same mask of impassiveness, then you make decisions.

One of Dutch’s superior tales of grit in the Southwest. Here we have a weary group of horse soldiers tracking a band of Apache that has raided a stagecoach and abducted a woman.

Formulaic stuff in many hands, in Dutch’s hands, it’s terse raw-bitten, and hard-edge.

A fine story.

“The Glory Riders” by Brian Garfield

Diamond crouched down and spoke in a voice calculated to reach no further than the Indian’s ears. “Hear me, Iron Feather, I’ll see you dead before I’m through with you. Remember that, Indian. I’ll teach you what it means to suffer.”

Iron Feather said quietly, “If you could teach me anything, you wouldn’t be wearing that uniform.”

A brisk stark tale of Horse Cavalry and the Indian Wars from a dependable author. I was struck by the theme embodied in the quote that characterizes the tension between the warring factions.

A rigid and organized way of life [the Cavalry] seems confining and wrong-headed to the Indian.

The loose and seemingly unstructured way of the Indian seems a non-progressive dead-end to the white man. 

It is a tale of action, but Garfield plays at a wee bit more here

Solid stuff.

“The Unbeliever” by Dorothy M. Johnson

“Youth could not be revived, but its companion, peril, could still be found by a man who took the trouble to look.”

That gorgeous and true line is found in Miss Johnson’s perceptive story of a white man living among the Crow.

Johnson also wrote the classic “A Man Called Horse” and ably shows that this is not a mere repeat of that story’s theme. It has its own breadth and depth.

Short but memorable.

A Question of Blood

Ernest Haycox, an author I make no bones about admiring, delivers much in this brief tale. We visit a “Squaw Man” and his family and follow them from the early days of pristine love, untouched by the taint of culture, through to the advent of other men “of his kind” and how the inevitable pull of comparison causes some to become unhappy with a lot that formerly provided much happiness.

Often at night, smoking before the fire and watching his boy crawl so awkwardly across the floor, he felt a strangeness at seeing her darkly crouched in a corner, lost in thoughts he could never reach. Sometimes the color and the sound of his early days in Missouri came strongly to him and he wished that she might know what was in his head. But he talked her tongue poorly and she would speak no English; and so silence lay between them.

A sad tale marked by truthful observation.

The Caballero’s Way

“The Cisco Kid had killed six men in more or less fair scrimmages, had murdered twice as many (mostly Mexicans), and winged a larger number whom he modestly forbore to count. Therefore, a woman loved him.

The Kid was twenty-five, looked twenty; and a careful insurance company would have estimated the probable time of his demise at, say, twenty-six.”

O. Henry created the Cisco Kid which in no way bears any resemblance to the amiable hero of the film and television series. O. Henry’s Cisco Kid is a cold-blooded killer. Affable, charming, but a killer through and through.

The story’s twist-in-the tale [a veritable O. Henry ending] is telegraphed a bit, but the descriptive and narrative language make this one a more than pleasing read.

Considered one of the Top 100 Western Tales, and rightfully so.