"Goldwater Ridge" by Hannah Kaye

This was a rollicking story -- part old-fashioned western, part tall tale, part whodunit.  Aimed at middle-grade readers, it's clean as a whistle.

Billy Bob Clyde, who prefers to be called just Clyde, heads west when he gets a garbled message from his father, who went west years earlier.  Clyde falls in with a bunch of bounty hunters, crosses a desert with no one to help him but his horse, and finally lands in the almost-deserted town of Cactus Poke.  There he meets a motley collection of people,...