Narrator

Jim Gough

Jim Gough
  • “Ride, You Tonto Raiders”

    Matt Sabre is a young and experienced gunfighter—but not a trouble seeker. But when Billy Curtin calls him a liar and goes for his gun, Matt has no choice but to draw and fire. To his surprise, the dying man gives him $5,000 and begs him to take the money to his wife, who is alone in defending the family ranch in the Mogollons. A combination of guilt, regret, and wanting to do the right thing leads Sabre to make that ride.

    “Riders of the Dawn”

    A young gunslinger is changed for the better by meeting a beautiful woman. A classic range-war Western, this novel features that powerful, romantic, strangely compelling vision of the American West for which L’Amour’s fiction is known. In the author’s words, “It was a land where nothing was small, nothing was simple. Everything, the lives of men and the stories they told, ran to extremes.”

    This story is one of Louis L’Amour’s early creations that have long been a source of speculation and curiosity among his fans. Early in his career, L’Amour wrote a number of novel-length stories for the pulps. Long after they were out of print, the characters of these early stories still haunted him. It was by revising and expanding these stories that L’Amour would create his first novels.

  • Louis L’Amour is now one of the most iconic Western writers of all time, but once upon a time he was Jim Mayo, a regular writer for the pulps. Some of the tales he wrote in those days stuck with him enough that he later revised and expanded them into novels. But there was a special magic to the originals, and after research and restoration, these stories appear here now in their original form.

    In “The Trail to Peach Meadow Cañon,” Mike Bastian, taken in by the legendary outlaw Ben Curry as an orphaned child and raised to one day take over his empire of crime, finds that day has come. As he prepares for his first criminal job, a gold-train robbery, Mike must decide whether to follow the path laid out before him or to carve out a destiny of his own.

    In the title story, Charles Rodney, shanghaied and forced into labor on a merchant vessel, eventually dies from repeated beatings—but not before deeding part of his ranch to Rafe Caradec, whom he hopes will protect his family.