title: Showdown at Baxter Springs
author: Wood, Larry
description: A a blend of romance, history, and traditional western, Showdown at Baxter Springs starts with
  Dallas Blackwood, marshal of Baxter Springs, Kansas, escorting a prisoner, Doyle Tindall, on a stagecoach from Ft. Scott, Kansas, to Baxter Springs during the late summer of 1868.  Among the passengers is Anastasia Forsythe, a pretty young woman headed to Baxter to set up a school.
  The stage is attacked by Tindall's outlaw gang, led by flamboyant Tango Pendergrass. The driver is killed, but Dallas fights off the attack, saving the life of the young woman. Anastasia remains unimpressed by the seemingly ruffian marshal but is momentarily smitten instead by another passenger, Royal Darling.
  Old Man Reuben Huff takes over as the driver, while Dallas’s friend Wades in the Creek rides shotgun. Their journey is fraught with trouble aplenty.
  Dallas's problems have only begun once his party reaches Baxter Springs. While safeguarding his prisoner until trial, he must also deal with tension between local citizens and the rowdy young Texans swarming the cow town. If that weren't enough, he wonders whether Anastasia will ever see him as anything more than a ruffian, uneducated town marshal.