"A man either chases his dreams, or he dies. Present-day ranch hand Charlie Lyles longs for an era before mechanization, when a cowboys greatest ally was his horse. He remembers stove-up old men telling of cattle drives and stampedes and shallow graves in lonesome country with few fences. At a dollar a day, none of them died rich, but for a cowboy who knew no other way to live, maybe it was a fair trade. Society has pushed Charlie toward a conformity that he hates, but he is about to change the rules. Walking up to a ranch hand at a remote line shack in West Texas, he steals a horse, leaving a perfectly good pickup behind. "You tell em, amigo," he says. "Tell all those hombres with their fancy equipment to just stay out of my world or play hell tryin to catch me.

" Track him they will, with a helicopter and radios and assault weapons, but they are headed into territory that hasnt changed in a century . and they are trailing a man born a hundred years too late. A finalist for the Spur Award of Western Writers of America upon its original publication, When Cowboys Die has been acclaimed as "spellbinding" and "an instant classic." This new volume, the first print edition in twenty-five years, includes a preface and "Requiem for a Cowboy," a documented account of the 1976 Texas manhunt that inspired the novel"--.