No Wonder

In Piperock, where hard-bitten cowboys Ike and Magpie have seen every kind of fraud, dreamer, and "expert" drift through town, the arrival of Reginald Alfred Jackson Hilton is comic trouble from the start. Overdressed, overconfident, and determined to reinvent himself as a Western hero, he quickly proves more ornamental than useful, though his awkward sincerity wins him a wary kind of sympathy. When Reginald admits he has been pretending to match the adventures in his favorite book for the sake of Violet, the woman he loves, Ike and Magpie decide to help him stage a heroic rescue. Their scheme—a fake stagecoach holdup meant to make Reginald look brave—unravels into gunfire, river chaos, arrests, and a string of wildly contradictory eyewitness accounts. Judges, sheriffs, posses, and rival versions of the truth only deepen the confusion, while Reginald somehow keeps blundering into bigger feats, including robbing a bank to "prove the theory." What follows is a slangy, slapstick chase through mud, swamp, and mule-back mayhem, where bravado and bad judgment keep turning into disaster. It's a rough-and-ready Western farce about reputation, romance, and the dangerous gap between the hero people imagine and the fool they really are. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.