Max Brand 
Valley Thieves 

Valley Thieves is a western adventure by Max Brand. Brand was an American writer known primarily for his Western stories. Excerpt: ‘I could feel my pulse in my forehead and in my lips. There’s nothing more exhausting than long fear, long expectation, and I felt as though my endurance had rubbed thin as a shingle, ready to break at a touch. I rolled over to the front wall and put my eye at the largest chink I could find between the floor and the edge of the wall. I could see the guard pacing up and down. His lantern was hung on the side of a tree. The light of it stretched his shadow long or short along the ground.’