This collection of Western tales contains three stories by the finest Western writers who ever lived.

In “Cañon Walls” by Zane Grey, Smoke Bellew enters a remote Mormon settlement only a jump ahead of a posse. Finding employment as a ranch hand working for a dowager Mormon, Smoke finds that his life undergoes a transformation and he is able to make her ranch a financial success, at the same time falling in love with her wanton daughter, Rebecca. But it is too good to last. The law follows him.

“Black Sheep” by Max Brand finds young Mary Valentine—upstart, tomboy, and general troublemaker—seeking to protect a man wanted by the law. To complicate her life even further, her two cousins, who have been dodging the law, return home and decide with their father to join the notorious Markle gang in holding up the local bank.

In “The Sixth Shotgun” by Louis L’Amour, Leo Carver is about to be hung. The only problem is that a lot of folks are indebted to Leo for one thing or another.

Zane Grey (1872–1939), born in Ohio, was practicing dentistry in New York when he and his wife published his first novel themselves. Grey presented the West as a moral battleground, in which his characters are destroyed because of their inability to change or be redeemed through a final confrontation with their past. The man whose name is synonymous with Westerns made his first trip west in 1907, at age thirty-five. Motion picture rights brought in a fortune, with 109 films based on his work.