About this ebook
FIGHT TO THE FINISH
They dropped their gun belts to fight it out another way. Buck Surratt knew his adversary had the strength of a rock-crusher. There was immense power in those ropy shoulder muscles, the girth of his neck, those thick wrists and fists, giving his arms the look of heavy-knobbed clubs. And yet Surratt goaded him, and so Bill Head threw himself across the room toward him. Surratt's mind told him he had made another mistake. Head slammed terrifically into him and threw him against the wall. His skull struck the boards, his brain roared. Head's fists were like axes chopping into his temples, driving daylight and memory out of him. Strength left his legs entirely, and thus blinded and stunned and momentarily helpless, he reached for Head's waist and caught it to weather the storm...
But that wasn't to be the end of it...
THE STRANGE WAYS OF A MAN'S LIFE always caught up with him, Buck Surratt realized, after he had crossed the desert to find ease and rest, there in the green forests of a new mountain world. But the ancient pattern of trouble was already cast upon even these hills, and he was once again trapped in the deadly pattern...
At the start they told him he would have to work for Bill Head or go to jail. Or leave town—if he could, alive.
The whole thing was going to lead him deeper and deeper into a perilous situation. And Judith Cameron, the girl with yellow hair who dressed in Levi's, what part would she play in the curious setup?
The famed Western novelist, whose over forty books have sold millions of copies in paperback—with many turned into highly popular films and adapted for TV.
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About the author
Ernest James Haycox (October 1, 1899 - October 13, 1950) was an American author of Western fiction.
Born in Portland, Oregon, to William James Haycox and the former Martha Burghardt, he attended local schools of both Washington state and Oregon. He enlisted in the United States Army in 1915 and was stationed along the Mexican border in 1916. During World War I he served in Europe, and after the war he spent one year at Reed College in Portland. In 1923, he graduated from the University of Oregon with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism. He married Jill M. Chord in 1925 and the couple had two children.
Haycox published two dozen novels and around 300 short stories, many of which appeared first in pulp magazines in the early 1920s. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was a regular contributor to Collier's Weekly from 1931 and The Saturday Evening Post from 1943. Fans of his work included Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway.
His story Stage to Lordsburg (1937) was made into the movie Stagecoach (1939), directed by John Ford and featuring John Wayne in the role that made him a star. The novel Trouble Shooter (1936), originally serialized in Collier's, was the basis for the movie Union Pacific (1939), directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea. Haycox wrote the screenplay for Montana (1950), directed by Ray Enright, which stars Alexis Smith and Errol Flynn.
Haycox died in 1950, at the age of 51, in Portland. In 2005 the Western Writers of America voted Haycox one of the 24 best Western authors of the Twentieth Century.
