It was a name that caused the most hardened gunmen to break out in a cold sweat. Chick Bowdrie. He could have ridden the outlaw trail, but the Texas Rangers recruited him because they didn't want to have to fight against him. Pursuing the most wanted men in the Southwest he knew all too well the dusty trails, the bitter cattle feuds, the desperate killers and the quiet, weather-beaten, wind-blasted towns that could explode into actions with the wrong...

John Henry Cole, working as a deputy U.S. marshal out of Judge Isaac Parker's court in Arkansas, was on assignment in the Indian Nations, in pursuit of a group of white renegades who were in hiding there above all a particularly vicious renegade named Caddo Pierce. He had a wagon of captive renegades when he was shot and seriously injured. He managed to come out of the Nations with his prisoners, but decided that he had enough of that job and so resigned....