THE MISADVENTURES OF SILK AND SHAKESPEARE by Winfred Blevins (Jameson: $13.95).

If you have the imagination to conjure up a vision of Huck Finn as a six-and-a-half-foot, Shakespeare-quoting, bearded mountain man, and Tom Sawyer as a teen-ager who is almost as thin as the flintlock musket he wields with such accuracy, then you have a running start here in accepting novelist Blevins’ good-natured romp through the Rockies of the 1830s.

An unlikely partnership under the most charitable of definitions, the virginal and romantic Tal Jones (“Silk”) is serving his apprenticeship in the mountain fur trade as a sideline to his real mission--finding his father, who, under a similar romantic compulsion, abandoned home and family for the wilds. And, in teaming up with “Shakespeare,” a sometimes backwoods thespian, Ronald Smythe (better known, and with good reason, as “Hairy”), we have the classic brains-and-brawn friendship as the resourceful Silk strives to keep his burly companion out of trouble. Novelist Blevins, an acknowledged expert on the fur trade of the period and on the ways and wiles of the Crows, Cheyennes and the colorful misfits who fled civilization for the lure of the Rockies, has created a cast of immensely likable horse-stealing, Indian-womanizing rogues in this, his second entry in Jameson Books’ Frontier Library series.