A Kansas town, a mysterious stranger with money and a past, and a range war between the cattlemen and the settlers who have fenced the water. Willis George Emerson was a Colorado promoter and lawyer who wrote fiction between ventures. The politics are populist, the villain is a banker, and the hero's secret is worth the two hundred pages it takes to arrive. Sixty plates of open range and weather, from Frederic Remington and George Inness among others, match the plains and the men who ride them.