The last Thursday in January, 1896, Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain, accompanied by his eight-year-old son, Henry, left Lincoln, New Mexico, in a buckboard to drive to his home in Las Cruces. He never arrived. Later a pool of blood and a blood-soaked handkerchief pointed to murder. Although indictments were returned, no one was convicted of that murder, one of New Mexico's most talked-about mysteries. That course of the territory's development had pitted the man of law and order, Fountain, against relentless outlaws, who finally got their man on a lonely stretch of road with the White Sands...