'Texas Showdown'

By Elmer Kelton, $24. 319 pages

Do you sometimes think you were born too late?

Would you have wanted to be a pioneer who settled the land from a log cabin? Maybe you'd have been a great gangster or a bob-haired flapper. Perhaps you wish medieval life wasn't just something in a history book.

Or maybe you wish you had lived in the Wild West.

If that last desire is your fondest, then do the next best thing. Pick up a copy of "Texas Showdown," the new double novel by Elmer Kelton. You'll feel as if you just put your boots down on a dusty cow trail.

When Johnny Fristo and Speck Quitman are cheated out of a winter's worth of cattle-tending wages, they aim to go after Larramore, the man who stiffed them. In the very O. Henry-like novelette "Pecos Crossing," Johnny and Speck find Larramore cowering on a stagecoach and they demand their money.

But Larramore is a little more cunning than a couple young cowboys, and he pulls a gun. In the ensuing wrestle over the firearm, Cora, the wife of former lawman Milam Haggard, is killed. Larramore blames Johnny and Speck as Haggard vows revenge on Cora, which makes the cowpokes flee the area.

Speck has always been one to run his mouth. Johnny, the quiet one, knows that Speck doesn't mean anything by it. But being chased by a vengeful man with a gun can do strange things to a young cowboy.

How long can two men run from someone who wants to kill them?

In the story "Shotgun," we find Macy Modock. Ten years is a long time to sit in prison, but it gave Macy plenty of time to hone his hate for Blair Bishop, the man whose money put Modock behind bars. Modock doesn't want to just kill Bishop. He wants him destroyed slowly, like a cat with a mouse.

Bishop has what any man would envy: he has fat cattle and enough water in this drought-stricken Texas land. His neighbor, Clarence Cass, is jealous, but what Cass hates more is that his beautiful daughter, Jessie, is in love with Bishop's son, Allen. Can Modock ruin the two feuding men and gain everything?

There is just something comfortingly familiar about reading a really good Western. Maybe it's because we baby-boomers grew up with the likes of Matt Dillon and The Rifleman. At any rate, "Texas Showdown" was an enormously enjoyable book to have in my hands.

With a flick of a word, Kelton offers cowboy heroes with conscience, a bad guy who hates being bad, a bad guy you want to see hang, pretty girls for the cowboys to win, horses, six-shooters, Longhorn cattle and Western justice - all in two novels that won't take too much time to read, but that you won't want to put down.

Put on your spurs, hitch up the car and mosey on over to your library or bookstore and find "Texas Showdown." For fans of the Western novel, this is one to tuck in your saddlebag.

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Terri Schlichenmeyer reviews books weekly for Sunday North.