The Cure of Silver Cañon

Max Brand wrote hundreds of stories, books, films, and TV shows. This book collects three stories from his early work in Western pulps.

In “Señor Coyote,” Frank Pollard, an in-debt rancher, asks a friend, Slip Liddell, to give him $500 before the bank forecloses on his ranch. Liddell refuses and, frustrated, Pollard threatens the banker. When the bank is robbed, will Liddell help when his friend is accused of the crime?

“The Power of Prayer,” was commissioned by Street & Smith for special Christmas editions of magazines the company published. In it, Gerald Kern embodies many of those same qualities of a figure found in several of Brand’s Western stories, a gunman who is also a gentleman.

In “The Cure of Silver Cañon,” the mountain desert is a country of the imagination where no man is ever a hero and no man is ever a villain, but rather a mixture of both. That dynamic plays out in the love triangle between Lew Carney, Jack Doyle, and Mary Hamilton. Both men love her, and readers can never know with certitude for whose soul it is that Mary Hamilton weeps. The story’s opening is perhaps the most imagistic and at the same time eerie as Brand ever wrote.