Jigger Bunts — Max Brand

Tom Reynard, ramrod for the Bar L, has a hard time each autumn finding cowpunchers willing to work the winter range in the bleak badlands near the Sioux reservation. So when Jigger Bunts, an eighteen-year-old familiar with riding and roping, showed up, he was hired, despite his youth.

To pass time in the bunkhouse, cowhands spin tall tales for Bunts, “the kid,” about the exploits of Reynard, and soon Reynard becomes Bunts' hero and role model. Reynard quickly tires of the hero worship and concocts a new hero for the kid in Louis Dalfieri, based merely on a picture and outrageous tales about a two-gun “Robin Hood.”

When Bunts brings a stranger to the ranch who cheats the Bar L cowboys at poker, the kid takes off to get their money back, to right the wrong as he believes Dalfieri would. This decision sends him down a path outside the law from which there appears to be no return. Reynard had all but given up hope to help Jigger Bunts -- until a chance encounter with an old friend, Maybelle Crofter.

Recently discovered among his unpublished works, this untraditional story will delight fans of Max Brand Westerns.