David M. Ratzlaff

Chance Bondurant and his younger brother Jace are forced off their windswept grassland farm in Lane County, Kansas when their folks died of the fever. The Bondurant brothers with no money and less hope head to the gold fields in the Colorado Rocky Mountains near the mining camps of Central City and Nevadaville, where a righteous gunfighter named Lucas Eldridge takes and mentors the older Bondurant after Chance witnessed the brutal murder of his brother at the hands of a roaming outlaw gang.

There will never be another Western writer like Louis L’Amour. A legendary author and indisputably the greatest storyteller in his genre of all time, L’Amour captivated millions of readers and has sold well over three hundred million copies of his works, which includes nearly ninety novels and countless short stories. Mistakes Can Kill You highlights an essential selection featuring nine of L’Amour’s earlier short stories, sometimes written under the pen name Jim Mayo, that exemplify the rugged morality of the best Western writing.

The time is 1902. The setting, eastern Oregon. Magic Child, a 15-year-old Native American girl, wanders into the wrong whorehouse looking for the right men. She finds Cameron and Greer, two gunmen taking a timeout from the game after an aborted job in Hawaii. Their violent past doesn't concern Magic Child. She wants them to kill a monster for her, one she says lives in the ice caves under the basement of Miss Hawkline's yellow house, and one she says has killed before. But the more she tells them about the monster, the more her story unravels.