The stories you are about to read are fiction. The story lines are from my imagination but the geographic areas are well known to me. The names of rivers, towns and railroads, however, have often been changed to fit the story. I purposely allowed my characters to be somewhat less than the average western hero type. In many long years of my life in the west I have seldom encountered the hard-drinking, hard-fighting gun hands so often written about.The average cowboy--whether from 1880 or 1980--is a lonely, hard working, honest man who desires only a good horse, his own place, a nice bunch of cattle and a good wife and children. He may have his faults but most that I have encountered over my rather long and varied life were truly good men with big dreams but not a lot of change in their Levi pockets. I hope you too will come to admire the heart of a cowboy as much as I do.Tom StephensonColorado Springs, July 2014