In 1881 Texas, Marshal Frank Mabry is faced with the most puzzling and dangerous assignment of his long career. The forty-two-year-old former Texas Ranger meets with representatives of the War Department and is told of a train robbery that occurred near Denver, Colorado, eight months earlier.500,000 dollars in government greenbacks and gold coins had been stolen, and two soldiers brutally murdered. All attempts by army and railway detectives to find the killers and recover the stolen money ended in failure.Then an army captain who had doggedly searched for the killers was found dead hundreds of miles from Denver, in a small Texas cow town. Had the captain unearthed a critical piece of information about the robbery but was killed before he could pass it along?The Secretary of War's top advisor, Hiram McDougal, wants answers. He is told the man for the job is Marshal Frank Mabry, a no-nonsense, relentless lawman who is familiar with the Texas country.Mabry quickly finds himself challenged with the job of not only finding the killers, but keeping himself and a ٢greenhorn٣ army lieutenant alive as well. Along the way, Mabry encounters a mysterious ranch foreman who is hiding a dark secret, a beautiful dark-haired saloon owner out of his past, and a passel of violent men who kill for the mere pleasure of it.