Max Brand

"Hugh Collier in "The Danger Lover" feels he is living an empty life as little more that a competent bank employee in the town of Stanton. He decides to leave behind a life that for him was a "cariacature and savage cartoon of the beautiful truth that life may be" and heads into the mountains alone, carrying only the essentials on his horse. Two things change the course of his adventure: he sees a town from a hill, and a stranger, desperate to file on a claim, convinces Collier to trade horses. Walking the stranger's horse into town, he soon finds himself mistaken for the outlaw, Bill Gadsen, by both Gadsen's worshipers and Lassiter, the man after the outlaw. In the Magic Gun, 22 year old Lewis Dikkon has led a sheltered life, working as a shoemaker for this taskmaster uncle, Charles Bender. Being inside most of the time, he knows little of the town and its inhabitants and they have no interest in him, other than as a poorly dressed oddball. A stranger named Sam Prentiss begins showing up every Saturday night to sit in a chair in the shop's doorway and look across the street for an hour. Their conversations begin to set Dikkon's mind to work and before long he decides he wants to buy a gun. When gunman Dan Hodge is killed and his personal items go up for auction, Dikkon gets his Colt, which he believes is a magic gun." -- back cover