'Guns of the Mountains' is a story in the Breckinridge Elkins series about a cowboy in the wild west. Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 - June 11, 1936) was an American author who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. He is well known for his character Conan the Barbarian and is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre. This is one of his western stories.