In the title story, Roan Childress has a small ranch in Montana. An incursion by rustlers has left him without the where-with-all to make his next mortgage payment to the bank. For this reason he lent an ear to Colonel Simon Houston, a big rancher in the Antelope Junction area of nearby Wyoming. Houston and the other big ranchers in the district are locked in a battle with the small ranchers who have been rustling their cattle. It is the dead of winter, 1891, and, desperate for the $600 in gold that Colonel Houston is offering, Childress agrees to help out. But the situation is far more complicated than Houston had described it...
