Hard Trail to Follow is the seventh novel in Elmer Kelton's acclaimed "Texas Ranger" series from Elmer Kelton Former Texas Ranger Andy Pickard, called "Badger Boy" when he lived with Comanches as a child, is following the plow on West Texas land until he learns that his friend, Sheriff Tom Blessing, has been killed during a jailbreak. The escaped bank robbers are led by a man calling himself Cordell. Andy gets reinstated as a Ranger so he can catch...

In "Barbed Wire," former cowboy and Irish fencing master Doug Monahan is unwittingly drawn into a barbed wire war, and in "Llano River," Dundee works to stop a cattle rustling operation and gets caught in the middle of a deadly feud.

"Hewey Calloway, one of the best-loved cowboys in all of Western fiction, returns in this novel of his younger years as he and his beloved brother Walter leave the family farm in 1889 to find work in the West Texas cow country. The brothers are polar opposites. Walter pines for a sedate life as a farmer, with wife and children; Hewey is a fiddle-footed cowboy content to work at six bits--75 cents--a day on the Pecos River ranch owned by the penny-pinching...

Andy Pickard and Logan Daggett investigate a series of killings and cattle thefts, while also dealing with a gang of regulators, a notorious hired gunman, and a telegram to the rangers from the state of Texas notifying them that their services are no longer required.