For more than 10 years Jim Allison packed a marshal's badge in the violent Indian Nations. When he finally quit, it was to move to New Mexico and get into the cattle business. For a time life was hard but good. But then a vicious killer came along and shattered his peaceful existence.

Hunter took his Colt from leather and checked it over one last time. He should have guessed his vengeance-quest would end in gunplay. Guns had played such a large part in it already; why shouldn't they have the last word? He stepped outside. The street was deserted save for the man who'd called him out, who stood 20 yards away - the most dangerous gunfighter in the whole south-west. Hunter saw faces watching him through dusty windows, and wondered whose side they were on.

Ben Crawford was one of the best lawmen in the business, and when a man named Kane offered him a hundred bucks a month to keep the peace in the fresh, raw town he'd just founded, it sounded exactly like the challenge he'd been looking for. So he took the job...and spent the next 12 years just waiting for something to happen. It never did. In fact, life in Kane's Crossing, New Mexico, grew so damn quiet that the townsfolk eventually decided they didn't really need a lawman at all. But fate had other ideas, because all hell was destined to break loose....

After graduating from West Point Military Academy, Mississippi-born Sam Lockwood was posted to far-away Arizona Territory, where he soon grew to love the hostile desert known as Apacheria. But the Civil War dragged him back to Mississippi, where he experienced all the horrors of a savage conflict, including the hell-on-earth that was the Union prison-camp known as the Rat Hole.

Jack Page was a living legend - a Union Army sharpshooter, scout, Indian fighter, and US Marshal. Ash Colter, by contrast, was a mild-mannered orphan. They were complete opposites. And yet, theirs was a partnership forged in blood and destined to go down in history. These were the men who survived the famous Snake River Shootout, the men who led Colonel George Armstrong Custer to one of his most controversial victories against the Cheyenne.

Almost before he knew it, Sam once a celebrated town-tamer whom Ned Buntline himself had called "The Pistol Prince" found himself embarking on a vengeance hunt. A boy Sam hadn't seen for fifteen years was connected with the killers, so that made it personal. But first and foremost, Sam was a peace-keeper. Convinced that the law would hang 'em all, he wanted the outlaws to have their day in court. The only thing he never reckoned on was the fact that they might very well kill him before he could find and catch them.

Rancher Clint McNally was looking for someone to deliver $20,000 to the men who’d kidnapped his young son. Whoever took the job had to be as hard as nails, so professional fighting man Carter O’Brien was the natural choice. Still, McNally knew better than to trust that kind of money to one man, so he gave O’Brien a partner - a one-eyed, cigar-chewing soldier of fortune called Logan Tyree. 

A desperate telegram from young Lane Jenkins brought Flint McKay north to Montana, where Randolph Billington was using every dirty trick in the book to take over the territory. But what could Flint do about it? He was just an ageing drifter with failing eyesight. He had no home and no kin, just a horse, a saddle and a pistol he’d won in a bunkhouse poker game.

Will Hooper was a sodbuster. Lee Early was a cowboy. They'd spent their entire lives on different sides of the fence. But then something terrible happened to make each man look beyond his own petty hatreds...like the outrage that occurred one stormy night at Will's farm.

After the final battle of the Civil War, Confederate Sergeant Travis Kane rode his Yankee horse away from Palmito Ranch to return to his ranch in Uvalde County. As he began the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile ride across West Texas, Travis was grateful for surviving the long, bloody war without being wounded. But now that the fighting was over, his biggest concern was for his young wife because he hadn’t received a letter from Lillian in almost two years.