Book excerpt: Elmer Kelton's Stand Proud and Eyes of the Hawk are two novels of fierce men tested by the Old West, written by one of the most critically acclaimed writers of the American west and offered at one low price. Stand Proud Frank Claymore is cantankerous, stubborn, and intolerant—just the qualities that make him a success as an open-range cattle rancher on the West Texas frontier. Stand Proud follows Claymore from the time of the Civil War to the dawn of the twentieth century—through marriage, births, deaths, and a creeping change in the society that once hailed him as a hero, and which later has him condemned as a despoiler and tried for murder. Eyes of the Hawk Thomas Canfield descends from a line of Texas’s earliest settlers. A proud man with a fierce-eyes stare, he inspires the Mexicans of Stonehill, Texas to call him el gavilan—“the hawk.” When Branch Isom—an insolent, dangerous newcomer—seeks to build his fortune at Canfeild’s expense, an all-out feud ensues, hurtling the town toward a day of reckoning that will shake the entire town to its very roots. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.