When the Berlin Wall went up, Gerta, her mother, and her brother Fritz are trapped on the eastern side where they were living, while her father, and her other brother Dominic are in the West--four years later, now twelve, Gerta sees her father on a viewing platform on the western side and realizes he wants her to risk her life trying to tunnel to freedom.

When Gloriana comes to Arizona to visit her tenderfoot brother Jim, trouble is rampant. The notorious Hash Knife Outfit of rustlers and gunmen are stealing the ranchers' cattle and terrorizing the beautiful valley. Guns will blaze and blood will run hot and red before Goloriana and her brother have a chance to become true and valiant citizens of the frontier Wild West...

"Hewey Calloway, one of the best-loved cowboys in all of Western fiction, returns in this novel of his younger years as he and his beloved brother Walter leave the family farm in 1889 to find work in the West Texas cow country. The brothers are polar opposites. Walter pines for a sedate life as a farmer, with wife and children; Hewey is a fiddle-footed cowboy content to work at six bits--75 cents--a day on the Pecos River ranch owned by the penny-pinching...

Rich easterner Janey Endicott comes to Arizona with her father, where she is bored until she meets archeologist Phillip Randolph, who is investigating ancient Indian pueblos in the midst of the West's wild culture.

Little Critter daydreams about what he would do to the local bully if he were Super Critter.