This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Horse Heaven is a rattlesnake-bitten mining camp where saloons, gamblers, undertakers, and gunmen crowd a hill built on greed and bad temper. Into this raucous Western comedy come Ike Harper and Dirty Shirt Jones, trading boastful jokes, empty-gun bravado, and pirate-style swagger as they navigate a town where no real marshal exists, prisoners are simply kicked off the bluff, and even funeral business feels like a frontier racket. As they meet the grimly comic "scientist" Solemn Sales, the sharp-tongued undertaker Tombstone Taylor, and the exasperated storekeeper Bull Burgoyne, the town erupts into a frenzy of bullets, dynamite, collapsing buildings, and mock justice. A poet-gunman leaves verse on the wall under fire, rival gunmen posture and bicker, and saloons like the Queen of Spades and Ten of Hearts are blown apart one by one. Through slapstick violence, mock-heroic language, and satirical frontier wit, the story turns Horse Heaven into a hilarious monument to lawlessness, masculine bluster, and the absurdity of a place where everybody hates everybody else—until the whole town is reduced to "GONE HENCE."

À propos de l'auteur

Tuttle, W. C.

W. C. Tuttle, born Wilbur C. Tuttle in the late nineteenth century, came of age during a period when the American West was still being mythologized in newspapers, magazines, and popular fiction. He built his career as a writer of lively Western stories, especially during the early twentieth century, and became widely admired for his ability to mix action, humor, and sharp characterization. Over time, he produced a substantial body of work that helped define the entertaining, fast-moving style of the magazine Western, often focusing on cowboys, drifters, small-town schemers, and the comic absurdities of frontier life. His fiction stands out for its warm wit, brisk pacing, and affection for ordinary people trying to make their way in a rough and changing world. Beneath the adventure and comedy, Tuttle often explored themes of loyalty, resilience, good-natured deception, and the tension between individual freedom and social order, concerns that still feel fresh today in stories about identity, community, and survival. His legacy lies in helping shape the popular Western as a genre that could be both exciting and funny, not merely heroic or grim, and in showing that frontier tales could reveal as much about human nature as about guns and horseback chases. Readers who enjoy classic Western fiction, regional Americana, or stories with a playful, human touch will find Tuttle especially rewarding.