THE REAL WEST!Max Brand"s novels and stories—certainly among the greatest in Western fiction—are always peopled with true, realistic characters and marked by a sense of authenticity few other authors could match. Three of the best examples of this are the short novels found in this collection, each painstakingly restored to Brand"s original version. The opening novel tells the tale of a legendary friendship between two men who could take on a whole saloon of tough frontiersmen, but who run into trouble with beautiful Kate Malone. "The King of Rats" features the man known as Reata, a master of the rawhide rope, a man caught between his sense of duty and his love for a gypsy girl. And in the title novel, Joseph Larrimee finally makes a gold strike that would prove his worth to his family...but he"s willing to give it all up to rescue a mysterious woman from a gang of hardcases.