Desperado #1

A killer's gun narrates its own violent history in this 1948 crime tale, tracing its journey from gunsmith Hank Beardsley's Tucson shop through the bloodstained hands of the ruthless Joe Slade. As Slade blazes a trail westward—cheating at cards, ambushing travelers, and leaving bodies in his wake—the revolver becomes witness to his reign of terror across the frontier. Written with the unflinching style of a true crime chronicle, this story lays bare the brutality of a man for whom lightning-quick triggers and murder are simply the business of staying alive.

Sam Bass may look like he stepped out of a vaudeville routine with his cross-eyed stare, but this unlikely desperado becomes the deadliest train robber in the West—recruiting a gang to pull off increasingly ambitious heists across Texas. When a railroad company finally sends in the Rangers to stop him, Sam finds himself cornered between his own ruthless ambitions and the closing net of lawmen determined to bring him down.

Bill Longley is a restless outlaw with a talent for gunplay who drifts from one lawless outfit to another, first riding with Jules Whittaker's gang before moving on to mining camps and saloons across the frontier. When a pair of card-game rivals turn him in to the sheriff for the $2,500 reward, Longley's cunning—and his guns—get him out of a tight spot, setting him on a ten-year trail of robbery, counterfeiting, and violence across multiple territories. Now, years later, he returns to Texas with something unexpected on his mind.