When Quinn Mendosa's gun-runners steal fifty crates of rifles from Fort Stirling, Sheriff Rourke Bowman reckons that plenty of trouble will be heading his way.

But that trouble arrives sooner than he expects when his jailbird brother Dave Bowman rides into town and raises hell.

Rourke has enough trouble on his hands, but when Dave offers to help him capture Mendosa by infiltrating his gun-runners it's an offer that's just too good to refuse.

Can the unreliable Dave complete his mission before the rifles fulfil their deadly purpose? Or will Rourke live to regret not running Dave out of town the moment he first clapped eyes on him?

It was only when a chair crashed through the Golden Star's window that Sheriff Rourke Bowman and Deputy Irwin Francis hitched up their gunbelts and strode across the road.

On the boardwalk they listened for a moment to the raised voices ripping across the saloon. Then both lawmen pulled their hats low and side by side pushed through the swing-doors and into the saloon.

Barton May was turned towards them. His hands were on his hips and he was glaring at a heavily bearded man, but from the wideness of this man's belligerent stance and the tone of his slurred oaths, he was clearly the worse for drink. Repeatedly, he was thrusting a finger in Barton's face and making him cringe with every lunge.

Rourke stared at the man's back. His eyes narrowed. But as neither Barton nor the other man was packing guns, he stood back.

'Deal with this, Irwin,' he said.

Irwin nodded and paced across the saloon. He swung to a halt before the arguing twosome.

'Barton,' he said, 'you're under arrest.'

'Ah, Deputy,' Barton whined. 'I ain't causing no trouble.'

Irwin snorted. 'Suppose there's a first time for everything. But this is the third time this week you've been fighting in here.'

'Yeah, but he threw the chair and...'

Irwin lifted a hand, silencing Barton, then turned to the new man. A hint of recognition tapped at Irwin's thoughts, but he shrugged it away.

'And what have you got to say for yourself?'

The man staggered round to face Irwin. The ripe odour of whiskey and vomit blasted at him. With one eye open and a shoulder held low, he looked Irwin up and down.

'Kind of reckon,' he muttered, slurring every word, 'that I want to say something.'

He rocked back, then rocked forward, his arms wheeling as he fought for balance. Then he swung back his fist and hurled it at Irwin, but the fist came so slowly that Irwin merely leaned back, letting the blow waft past his face.

The man staggered round in a circle. He thrust out a leg to stop himself falling, then threw his second blow at Barton. This blow missed too, but with a shrug towards Irwin, Barton slammed a sharp uppercut to the man's chin which snapped his head back.

The man stood upright, then fell backwards, his body as straight as a tree, and landed with a solid thud on the floor.

Within a moment, the man was rasping deep snores.

'I had to do that,' Barton murmured, raising his hands and backing from Irwin. 'He threw the first punch and he was trying to pick a fight before that.'

Irwin winced and turned to the bartender, who considered the fallen man, then Barton. He shrugged and provided a nod.

'Yeah,' he said. 'Barton wasn't interested in no fight. But that man was set on raising hell from the moment he came in here.'

As Irwin nodded, Rourke sauntered across the saloon to join him.

'You just got lucky, Barton,' he said. 'We ain't arresting you. But that was your last warning. Any more trouble and you're facing more than one night in a cell.'

Barton muttered to himself, then paced over the fallen man. As he shuffled to the bar, Rourke grabbed the fallen man's legs while Irwin levered his hands under his armpits.

'Has he got any money, Sheriff?' the bartender shouted, pointing at the jagged shards of glass in the window frame. 'Because I got me a broken window to pay for.'

'While this man's in my custody, you ain't getting his money.'

'Then how do I pay for a new window?'

Rourke released the supine man's leg to tip back his hat.

'I just reckon it'd be easier on all of us if you didn't get your windows broken in the first place.' Rourke winked at Irwin. 'So the next time that someone as drunk as this piece of saloon trash wants a drink, don't serve him.'

The bartender snorted. 'But that'd get my windows broken even faster.'

Rourke laughed. 'Perhaps, but that just ain't my problem.'

He nodded to Irwin and, on the count of three, they lifted the supine man. They shuffled their hands to grab a firm grip, then walked him out of the saloon and down the boardwalk to the sheriff's office.

With some manoeuvring to avoid banging the man's head, they edged into the office.

At the back of the office were three cells, all of which were unoccupied. Irwin kicked open the central cell. Then they slipped inside and dropped the man on the bunk.

Through all these manoeuvrings the man never stirred from his slumbers, maintaining an incessant snoring instead.

With his hands on his hips, Irwin whistled under his breath while Rourke rolled his shoulders, relieving his strained muscles, and sauntered from the cell.

Irwin locked the cell door, then leaned on the bars.

'Any idea who this ugly varmint is?' he asked.

Rourke joined Irwin in considering the snoring man.

'Yup,' he said. 'His name is Dave.'

'How do you know that?'

Rourke pushed from the bars and snorted.

'Because he's my brother.'

Special edition DVDs let viewers see scenes that were deleted from movies, but unless you're an ultra-famous author, the same isn't true with books.

And for me, the characters that had suffered the most from deletion were the Bowman family.

Dave Bowman had appeared in both The Outlawed Deputy and Yates's Dilemma, but in both cases, his scenes got trimmed and trimmed until he had just one or two lines of dialogue and not much else. And his brother Rourke was the deputy of the sheriff that got blasted away in the opening chapter of Bad Day in Dirtwood, but his role also ended up being trimmed so much that he totally disappeared from the book.

I reckoned the Bowman family needed a second chance. So, to ensure they didn't get deleted this time, this novel made them the main characters.

And curiously, they did get a sort of revenge on the characters that had forced them out of previous stories when Marshal Jake T. Devine from Devine's Law suffered the indignity of being the one who had to be radically trimmed down to just a few scenes.