From the master of the western comes a novel full of romance and adventure. The story begins: In the early sixties a trail led from the broad Missouri, swirling yellow and turgid between its green-groved borders, for miles and miles out upon the grassy Nebraska plains, turning westward over the undulating prairie, with its swales and billows and long, winding lines of cottonwoods, to a slow, vast heave of rising ground-Wyoming-where the herds of buffalo...

Jane Witherspoon has a vast inheritance left to her by her Mormon father. Knowing she is romantically involved with a Gentile, Elder Tull has published his claim to make her his wife and obtain her inheritance. Just as Elder Tull and a group of Mormons are about to whip the Gentile and banish him from Mormon Utah, the notorious gunman--and enemy of the Mormons--known as Lassiter rides in and intervenes. The Mormons initiate their punishment on Jane...

Tappan's burro: A prospector named Tappan rescues a sickly, lop-eared baby burro and does not realize that this is to be one of the most important things he will ever do. Black Jack: "Black Jack Hollis had been killed as Elizabeth Cornish watched. Recklessly, joyously, his black hair flying, Jack had ridden into town to see his infant son. Then a shotgun, fired from a window, had blasted him from his horse and flung him to his death in the street....