It’s 1852. The wounds of the Mexican War are healing. Regis Royle, co-owner of a steamship fleet, has made it out alive, relatively unscarred and with enough profit and foolhardy ambition to envision a new life in south Texas. With the help of his crack-shot kid brother Shepley, his glad-handing riverboat partner Cormac Delany, and his old friend, raw-edged former Texas Ranger Jarvis “Bone” McGraw, Regis is laying claim to the prime jewel in a magnificent rolling prairie: the Santa Calina range teeming with wild mustangs, cattle, and eighteen-thousand acres of lush promise.

Buck Cordell is a giant of a man in a giant, untamed land called Texas. He builds a cattle ranch where ordinary men all say it can't be done a cattle empire that defies all odds, a family that changes the course of Texas history, and a legacy that outlives the Old West.

Was it justice... or revenge? What drove a simple farmer to set out on an impossible quest after a gang of bloodthirsty killers that raped and murdered his wife and slit his small son's throat? Their trail led him halfway across the country and deep into Mexico. One by one he tracked them down and brought them to justice, sometimes at the end of a short rope, more often in front of his fast guns, and he didn't care which.

The great state of Texas is a land of opportunity. For outlaws. And horse thieves. And cattle rustlers. Not to mention bank robbers, train robbers, and anything-that-ain’t-nailed-down robbers. The state’s governor, Richard B. Hubbard, is at the end of his rope. He wants to clean up Texas once and for all—and he’s desperate enough to try something crazy: hire a man who can do what the Texas Rangers can’t. A man not tied down by a wife or children. Or rules. Who’s not afraid to go outside the law.

Virgil Scott and his best friend Roy Sheffield left their horse ranch and were making one of their routine runs to Denver to deliver 32 horses. But the short trail drive proved to be anything but routine when late that first night, they were set upon by men wielding deadly clubs.