The Gambling Man

"You got a choice. Hang as a horse thief or teach our schoolkids."

That was the decision facing Mage Casebolt, a decision that made him wish he had never disembarked the riverboat at New Orleans.

Bound for San Francisco to join his brothers in a gambling emporium, Mage's journey halts abruptly in Valley Springs when he is framed for horse stealing.

The teaching job is unpleasant enough, but then a cholera epidemic quarantines the town, saddling him with an old freed slave, twelve boisterous schoolchildren who make a practice of running teachers out of town, and the local postmistress who detests the idea of a gambler playing the part of schoolmaster.

Then the rustlers hit, and Mage faces the task of reining them in with his little contingent of misfits. He quickly realizes that mixing kids, guns, dynamite, and rattlesnakes can make life mighty exciting, and uncertain.

Kent Conwell grew up in the wide-open Texas Panhandle in the town of Wheeler, population 848. His love for the West came naturally, for his grandfather had run away from his Tennessee home when he was 14. He bullwhacked his way to the Panhandle where he met his future wife who had traveled from Illinois to Texas. After moving to Fort Worth, where he was more at home at stockyards than school, Kent earned a B.S. and began teaching. Later, he moved to Port Neches, where he acquired a M.Ed. and Ph.D. A successful educator, his love for writing about the West, a period in history unique to America, has never waned. He has won awards for short stories, screenplays, mysteries, and westerns.

The Gambling Man is Kent's twenty-first western for AVALON.