The story: When two hard-case characters rode in from the Badlands, Blue Pete smelt trouble a mile off. Nor was his instinct at fault. Outbreaks of rustling quickly followed the arrival of these men and suspicion turned to certainty when they made for the hills driving Blue Pete's own steers before them. Although a man of peaceful pursuits, Pete reckoned there were some things no man could do to him and get away with, and stealing his cattle was one of them. His half-breed blood afire, he followed in pursuit and plunged blindly into the trap which had been set for him. Quickly he realized that this was not just a rustler's ruse but an ingenious trap laid by an old enemy intent on levelling the score between them. Usually, in such circumstances, a man's only chance is to come out shooting, but this time it didn't work out quite like that. Truth says: "Blue Pete is the most popular of cowboy characters in fiction. . . . Mr. Allan has the technique of the Wild West at his finger-tips."

Into Medicine Hat, just before the year's big beef roundup, drift four cow-punchers from across the Border. Everything about Slick Jordan, their leader, stamps him as a dude, except the way he whirls a rope and handles his steel-dust broncho. When Jordan singles out Blue Pete for his attention, Inspector Barker, of the Mounted Police, has a hunch that trouble is about to follow in the wake of the newcomers. He learns how right his hunch was when Sergeant Mahon, Blue Pete's friend, reports on the strange happenings that delay the roundup. Blue Pete finds his time fully occupied keeping check on Jordan and his companions, who have hired out to the T-Inverted R and promptly ran foul of its foreman, Tully Mason. Secret attempts at murder and covert rustling across the Border step up the tempo of this new story in which the popular Blue Pete again proves that he can think faster than the next man, and that for him, at least, the dark expanse of the Cypress Hills holds no secrets.

Once again Blue Pete features in this high-speed Western. As usual, on the side of border justice, he is marked down by his enemies for vengeance; and Pete, taking the law into his own hands, is hunted by the Mounted Police. On the prairies and mountain trails of the border a desperate double duel of wits and guns is fought out but the tough little half-breed finally triumphs in spite of the Mounties misgivings.

Blue Pete, in his role of undercover helper of the RCMP, once more sets out to bring justice and retribution to a group of bank-robbers who had held up a bank in Red Deer. Ring-leader of the bandits is Flying Cloud, an Indian with a forked tongue, who tries to outwit the half-breed on his trail and in doing so start a feud between two neighbouring camps. Mountain Stream, a wise chief, sees through Flying Cloud's game, and his friendship for Blue Pete remains unshaken. But Brown Tepee is won over by Flying Cloud's easy promises. He overcomes his fear of the long arm of the Mounties, and joins forces with Flying Cloud. But Blue Pete is more than a match for both of them. Time and again he foils their cunning moves to destroy him and his friends, and finally he is able to defeat them in the very moment of their triumph. Yet even Blue Pete has to learn afresh that he cannot accomplish all he sets out to do without help from Mira, the amazing white woman who married him and shares his wild, untamed life.

Blue Pete, secretly chosen by the Mounted Police to capture an Indian murderer, in his characteristic way picks up the trail and follows it into the mountains. He becomes involved in a bank-robbery that earns him a new and implacable enemy who dogs his path throughout the chase of the murderer-a perilous, unrelenting chase in the depth of winter. Disguised as an Indian, Blue Pete moves from tribe to tribe, helped and hindered by the red men. He faces zero cold, wild animals, and flying bullets, and all the time he must keep secret the task he works at. Finally, he faces a dilemma where duty and instinct struggle for mastery.

WHAT THIS STORY IS ABOUT As much to serve his own ends as to help the authorities Blue Pete went to the aid of the Mounties in rounding up a mysterious cattle rustler who did not shrink even from murder. How, with his characteristic genius for finding trouble, Blue Pete was soon at grips with his old friend Sergeant Mahon; how he saved the Sergeant's life and all but lost his own; and how as a result of his efforts he was himself arrested for murder only to be ultimately vindicated are stirringly told in this grand, hundred-thrills-a-minute yarn. "The most popular cowboy character in fiction," is how Truth describes Blue Pete. "Mr. Allan has the technique of the Wild West at his finger tips"-an opinion which is amply confirmed by this rollicking, swift-moving narrative of the great open spaces.

Blue Pete was not a rancher-with that Indian blood he had to have some excitement in his life. Inspector Barker makes Blue Pete and unofficial detective to do a task that the North-west Mounted Police cannot officially, lawfully, fulfill. This job takes Blue Pete west past Fitzhugh (Jasper, today), past the British Columbia border wherein the Mounties have no authority to work. Here Pete makes too many new 'friends', each of which may be a deadly enemy! Life in the end-of-steel village is exciting, even without his detective work!