Texas Rangers in Action #9

A young frontiersman named Doug Dobler heads to Austin to join the Texas Rangers, confident his fighting skills will carry him through—but a ruthless local called Doc Vesey and his gang have other plans. When they steal his horse and gun, Dobler must decide whether to walk away or stand his ground against impossible odds. Gritty frontier justice meets raw determination in this tale of a recruit's first real test.

When Clutch Hansen's gang repeatedly strikes north of the border and then flees to Mexico, Texas Ranger Clay Holden finds himself stymied by jurisdiction—until a chance to prove himself to Mexican Sergeant Filippe Alado of the Rurales opens an unexpected door. Together, the ranger and the Mexican lawman forge an unconventional alliance to track the outlaws across the Rio Grande and finally bring them to justice. It's a clever tale of two lawmen learning that sometimes the best way to catch a criminal is to bend the rules just enough.

Loonie Les tackles a crossword puzzle and gets stumped by a clue about a five-letter desert animal, but when someone helpfully suggests the answer, Les comes up with his own hilariously wrong definition that lands him in hot water. It's a quick, punchy gag that proves sometimes the dumbest answers are the funniest ones.

When a Texas Ranger arrives in a dusty West Texas town, Tap Nelson recognizes something impossible in the stranger's eyes—a ghost from two years past, when Nelson's gang left a young government guard for dead in a burning shanty. Now the man Nelson thought he'd killed has returned to settle accounts, and Nelson discovers that some debts can't be outrun. Burnham's Ghost delivers a tense tale of reckoning and survival wrapped in frontier justice.

Ranger Ty Medford pursues outlaw Nick Kelly's gang to their stone fortress hideout in the Rimrock, a place the gunslingers call Kelly's Castle—a seemingly impregnable stronghold where the law's posse couldn't touch them. Wounded but determined, Medford devises a daring plan to infiltrate the fortress from above and confront Kelly on his own ground. What unfolds is a tense gunfight deep within the castle walls, where the ranger's grit and cunning are tested against an enemy who thinks they've already won.

A sickly Gopher Face seeks reassurance from a concerned friend, only to get some darkly comedic news straight from the doctor himself—a punchline that lands with a groan-worthy twist in this 1957 one-pager from Texas Rangers in Action.