Fifteen-year-old Joe Beck wasn’t listening as the minister eulogized his uncle but was already planning on what he would have to do as soon as they returned to the Quimby farm. He wasn’t welcome there even before his uncle had died and knew that his cousin John would soon order him to leave. While he had had a basic idea of where he would go after he left the farm, he didn’t know what he would do with the rest of his life.

Mattie Foster had made a terrible mistake. She had left Missouri and come to Green River, Wyoming to find her father; a father who was not the man that she even knew. Now, she was being held by two men against her will. The man who was determined to find her was a rancher. A rancher with a debt to repay.

The war was ending for Captain Eugene Stewart. He and the rest of the 85th Illinois would soon be mustered out and he’d return home to Peoria. After he entered his tent, he found a thick envelope from his mother sitting on his cot. When he unfolded the pages, another envelope fell to the ground. He picked it up and noticed the heavy hand that had written the address. It hadn’t been sent to him with the army but was forwarded by his mother. After reading his mother’s letter, he stared at the sealed envelope and thought about tossing it into the fire rather than reading it.

Morgan was meeting with an important client in his well-appointed law office in San Antonio when his clerk tapped on the door and entered without waiting for a reply. Morgan didn’t mind as he expected Jim Cooper had a good reason for the interruption.

After five long years in the army, First Lieutenant John Flynn was finally being mustered out and would soon be going home to the family he hadn’t even heard from in all that time. But when he rode to the family home, he made two shocking discoveries: his family was gone, and he had been declared dead by the army four years earlier. He left to cross the plains of Nebraska to find his family, but he would find so much more.

When aging cowboy Gus Matthews gets fired from Rocking-C ranch for laying out the mean-spirited, know-nothing foreman, he heads north for Oklahoma, where he finds work with the Aronsons, an elderly couple whose ranch has seen better days. What should be easy work for kindly employers quickly turns sour when Gus discovers that the neighboring Slash-M ranch have been rustling the Aronsons’ cattle. Even worse, Gus becomes the corrupt sheriff’s main suspect in a string of violent crimes plaguing the county.

Jake Fletcher thought he’d been blessed among all men when he stood at the aisle across from his bride. How such an ordinary man like himself had won her heart still astounded him. It wasn’t until a month later that he understood what had attracted her attention, and that discovery would drive him across the plains of Colorado and Kansas to find her.

The loud roar snapped Mrs. Doyle from her sleep, and she quickly slid from her bedroll, stepped to the tents flap, and pulled it aside seeing a bear standing on its hind legs just a few feet from her. What made it more horrifying was what she didn't see. The camp behind the bear was empty. She dropped the flap and turned to her the frightened boy standing behind her. He looked at his equally terrified nanny unaware that they had been abandoned to die in the wilderness.

No one had seen the innocuous rock on the long climb to the pass on the Oregon Trail, and when the last covered wagon in the long line rolled onto the lump of granite, it shouldn’t have made much of a difference, but it caused almost instant tragedy. Just seconds later, the wagon plunged over the edge of the narrow trail, then began its deadly, tumbling roll into the abyss, spewing its contents as it fell to its destruction. Her precious children had been trapped inside, and Rebecca could only watch in horror. Her children had been her life, and now she had nothing.

As Carl sat astride his roan gelding and stared at Pine Bluffs, he knew that his days of punching cattle were over. The long drives across the West were dying now that the railroads had crisscrossed the Plains. Ironically, his last formal education had given him the skills and knowledge to help build those railroads, and now he’d finally put them to use. His short-term plan of spending a quiet night or two in Pine Bluffs would soon be altered by a simmering man-made volcano in the mountains of central Wyoming at a mine that provided the coal for the railroad’s locomotives.

Clay County Sheriff Rusty Price had been following the two killers since they galloped out of his town but kept out of sight until the sun set. In the low light, he closed the gap and planned to wait until they crawled into their bedrolls to take them down.

Joey couldn’t imagine a better 13th birthday. He’d been given his first pistol and now was going to join his six older brothers on tomorrow’s job. They were going to trust him with covering their escape after robbing the bank and he was determined to do it right. He was immensely proud to be a Hogan, and his tough brothers were his heroes.

Erich had been treated as a freak of nature for as long as he could remember. When he was twelve, he was bigger than any fully grown man in Brainerd. His defense against the constant taunts was to retreat into a shell which marked him as a dimwitted giant. He'd been working as a blacksmith for six years when he found himself without a job and decided to leave Minnesota for the far West. Maybe in Montana Territory he would be more readily accepted as just a man and not a monster.

Sixteen-year-old Henry was ejected from the enormous St. Martin ranch and told never to return, or he would be shot on sight. He vowed to return and seek revenge against the entire family. When he finally returned, it wouldn’t be as Henry St. Martin, it would not be as a 16-year-old boy seeking justice for his mother, but as a hardened lawman with the name of Alex Paine.

Mack Smith had left his shop in Pueblo and was just an hour or so from reaching his brother’s ranch for his annual visit when he felt the bullet slam into his head, and when his eyes finally opened, he found himself flat on his back on the bottom of a ravine. What the hell had happened? He was only a gunsmith, not a gunfighter.