Catlow

Catlow is a western novel by Louis L'Amour, published in 1963. Its two central figures, Ben Cowan and Bijah Catlow, were bound as friends from childhood, and the book sets that history against the work each of them has taken up as an adult.

By the time they are grown, Catlow is a first-rate cowhand with a wild streak, and a single disastrous confrontation with a group of greedy ranchers is enough to put him on the wrong side of the law. Cowan becomes a United States marshal, so the man sent after Catlow is the one person who already knows exactly what he is dealing with.

The pursuit is complicated by Cowan's wish to take his quarry alive, which is not what anybody else in the story wants, and by Catlow's refusal to make the chase an easy one. What the two of them still share is the friendship that predates the warrant, and the novel runs on the tension between a marshal's duty and a loyalty he cannot quite put down.