A novel on the early days of the Texas Rangers when they were merely groups of low-paid cowboys, without badges, protecting ranches from Indians. The hero, Rusty Shannon, runs into a band of Indians which killed his family when he was a child.

Rusty Shannon tries desperately to resume his prewar life.

Ranger privates Andy Pickard, the onetime Comanche captive called Badger Boy, and the war-anguished Farley Brackett, are assigned to deliver a prisoner to the sheriff of a county some distance from the ranger camp on the San Saba River. The prisoner, Jayce Landon, has recently killed a man named Ned Hopper and is to stand trial for murder. The rangers quickly learn that the Landon and Hopper families are involved in a blood feud and that Jayce Landon...

"Former Texas Ranger Andy Pickard ("Badger Boy" as he was known as a youth living among Comanches), leaves his fiancées farm in north central Texas. He begins to track the man, Luther Cordell, who he believes killed his friend, Sheriff Tom Blessing. Pickard is mistaken. But although Cordell did not kill Blessing, the robber-ringleader must be brought to Ranger justice and the rest sorted out later."--Publisher website: http://us.macmillan.com/hardtrailtofollow...

In Texas Standoff, Ranger Andy Pickard and his partner, Logan Daggett, are sent to central Texas to investigate a series of killings and cattle thefts. The two biggest cattlemen in the area blame each other for the violence, but it seems to Andy that neither man may be guilty. The case is complicated by the rise of a gang of "regulators"-masked vigilantes-and the arrival of a notorious hired gunman whose employer is unknown. The murder of a captured...