The long, dusty cattle-drive from Texas to Kansas is over, but as Avery Carson stands in the warm light of a Dodge City morning, he is shrouded in a dark cloud of grief. Now that the toil and ever-present dangers of the drive are behind him, tragic events back home rise up as poignant as ever. He can't go back; he has neither the courage nor the strength of will to do so. Instead, he leaves everything he knows behind and strikes out into the wilds of the frontier wilderness to lose himself.

After weeks of solitude, he stumbles on the small settlement of Bow City and decides to make a...