The Seventh Man

The Seventh Man is a 1921 Western novel by the prolific American author Max Brand (real name Frederick Faust, 1892–1944) and the third book in the Dan Barry Trilogy, following The Untamed and The Night Horseman. Its protagonist is Dan Barry, nicknamed "Whistling Dan": a man isolated from society who can nonetheless communicate with animals by instinct, accompanied by a wolfdog named Black Bart and a black stallion named Satan. The story centers on his pursuit of justice for a grave wrong—to settle the score he must face seven men one by one, and the title's "seventh man" is the last opponent on this path of revenge. While unfolding gunfights, manhunts and gallops across the wilderness, the novel uses Dan Barry's silence, solitude and almost feral intuition to probe the boundary between justice and revenge, creating a tragic hero torn between civilization and the wild. Brand writes with speed and strong visual sense, and his characters' emotions run high; the book is regarded as a representative Western that combines popular readability with literary quality. This is a public-domain English original, often included in collections of English classics.