Reckoning at Dead Apache Springs - Tapa dura

Joe Phoebe and his partner, Ira Croton, ride boldly into the forbidding hill country of central Texas for two reasons: first, to take a job bullwhacking for Mills' Freight and Livery in Dead Apache Springs; and second, on the outside chance that someone might recognize Joe, or that he might run into something that could trigger his memory, which has been wiped out by a minié ball at Appomattox.
Instead, they ride into a tangled conspiracy of cold-blooded murder, barn burnings, cattle rustling, kidnapping, and buried gold. When a fragment of Joe's memory does return, the recollection stuns him: prior to the war, he had ridden with a band of outlaws that had robbed the bank in nearby Abbottville.
As rugged as the country in which the story is set, so is the blazing action as a hard-nosed cowpoke battles a cattle baron who will stop at nothing to drive out smaller ranchers in a land grab the size of Texas, a struggle that ends in an unexpected and bizarre twist of events.

Kent Conwell grew up in the wide-open Texas Panhandle in the town of Wheeler, population 848. A successful educator, his love for writing about the West, a period in history unique to America, has never waned.
Reckoning at Dead Apache Springs marks his thirty-third Western. Shootout on the Sabine, Llano River Valley, and Grave for a Dead Gunfighter are his most recent Western titles. Kent has also written numerous mysteries, including The Tony Boudreaux Mystery Series and The Riddle of Mystery Inn.