Max Brand

Joe May finds being on his own difficult as he reflects "Sixteen is a bad age for a boy. It is too full of growing and not enough full of strength." Joe's coming of age story in Alaska during the gold rush of the 1890's is an intertwining backdrop to the conflict between Hugh Massey and Arnie Calmont. Massey and Calmont were a legend in the Yukon, partners in all until they clash over a most extraordinary and powerful dog known as Alec the Great,...

"In "The White Streak," twenty-one-year-old Jimmy Babcock, a former football star, but now a worker at the local bank run by William Parker in the town of Dresser, which has changed from cattle country to one made up of oil and alfalfa fields. When Parker fires Jimmy, all Jimmy can think is how he will hurt Muriel Aiken, his fiancée, who wants to marry. When his father signs over the old family homestead to him that is in serious need of repair,...

I'd almost been middleweight champion of the world. But then some doctors told me my heart was no good -- from now on everything must be slow and easy; no emotion. Keep your heart locked up. Smile at everything. Play poker all your life. That was just how I happened to go wrong. I found out that if I worked out slowly, I could still ride a horse, even climb a mountain. All I had to watch were my nerves. Every time I got a nerve shock, my heart went...

Barney Dwyer was a powerful and good-natured young cowpuncher. Unfortunately, his hands were so strong that he broke almost every farm tool he touched. Finally his hot-tempered ranch-owning boss, Dan Peary, lost his patience and fired him, paying Barney off with a mustang so wild that even professional horsebreakers couldn't ride it.