The Secret of Crutcher's Cabin: A Western Trio

by Walt A. Coburn

In three of his finest short novels, published for the first time in book form, The Cowboy Author captures the West as it was, vividly and memorably, drawing from the palette of his own experience. Set in Northern Mexico after the Great Was and the passage of Prohibition in the United States, Don of the Black Serape tells the story of Steve Doyle, a young American who served for a time in Pancho Villa's gringo battalion before joining the A.E.F. in Europe. The infamous don is an old man who wields great political power in his district, and who has seized his daughter from the convent where she had been hidden by her mother. In the same setting Senor Satan is the story of whiskey-running and drug-smuggling in the United States, and the efforts of an American federal agent to capture the leader of the cartel - second-generation pirate Captain Wylie Hackett. The title story is set on Coburn's home ground of Montana, where a young boy's rustler father has been killed by cattlemen. Questions arise about his real paternity when a rancher decides to adopt him while his father's outlaw associate attempts blackmail and threatens murder.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1999