Thomas Pearl Wade rides into the Sprague River Valley in the spring of 1924 and kills a man before he's finished his first day. Five years adrift since the war took everything he had, Tom means to work a week, draw his pay, and move on. But Cole Dressler doesn't share a valley. Behind the handshake and the hospitality, the cattle baron is starving out homesteaders, burning logging camps, and buying up Sprague River one ruined man at a time?and the two women running the valley's only newspaper need someone willing to stand where the law won't.

Between Nell Harte's steady gray eyes and a debt to a piece of ground he never meant to love, Tom finds the one thing the war didn't burn out of him. When Dressler sends for a professional gunfighter to finish what his hired men couldn't, Tom learns exactly what a man will do to hold a country?and what it costs to take one back.

For readers of Louis L'Amour: spare, hard-riding, and unflinching.