Annie and Charlie Darke suspect someone is trying to chase them from their Wyoming valley home. Wes Gray, a friend of Annies's Uncle, travels to Beecher's Gulch to investigate and arrives just in time to rescue Charlie from a lynch mob. Then he's catapulted into a violent struggle to save the Darkes' ranch when the son of their neighbour, Duke Barton, is ambushed and Charlie becomes the main suspect. Wes is determined to discover the truth, but the more he learns the less sure he is of the true motive of the Darkes' enemies. Up against a sheriff who may be on Duke Barton's payroll and the Cheyenne Indian, Hawk, has Wes met his match?

Until the night of the fire, Stanton, Montana, was a peaceful town. It boasted a church, a school and a bank, and no longer attracted those hard-riding, hard-drinking characters who brought with them the kind of lawlessness and destruction that had been rife during its earlier frontier days. Its marshal, Silas Tasker, rejoiced in the knowledge that he had rid the town of the kind of rip-roaring reputation attributed to so many other cattle-towns across the west. But in the aftermath of the blaze that destroyed the barn on the Diamond-H ranch, a man lost his sanity, others died and Silas found himself confronted with a feud capable of developing into an unstoppable range-war.