Long Ride Home - W Michael Gear

There is a reason "Long Ride Home" has remained in print for twenty years. The novel is a classic. The gunman has become a romanticized American icon, but Gear dares to take us inside his gunfighter's troubled soul: that of a man teetering between destruction and salvation.

Theo Belk is the quintessential gunfighter: rootless, ruthless, and deadly. In the fierce and lawless Western frontier of 1874 these traits were what was needed to stay alive. Haunted by the ghosts of the men he's killed, there is one man he has set out to destroy...Louis Gasceaux, the man who murdered his parents while a younger Theo watched. But the trail Theo's following is long and bloody...and Louis always seems to stay a few steps ahead.

This is how it was--from gritty buffalo and gold camps to brawling, building towns like Denver, Cheyenne, and Dodge City, populated with ambitious dreamers, deluded fools, and pragmatic women.