"For ten years, since he was sixteen, Cy Wester had been making a name for himself on the rodeo circuit: riding brones, bulldogging steers and sharp shooting. Now he was ready, before his bones started to creak, to stock a ranch and to turn to less dangerous pursuits, Then he found the rodeo pard he had made his segundo had been wanted for murder in the very area where Cy himself was being accused of stealing cattle by a firebrand of a girl he had outbidden at auction.

  Furthermore she warned Cy that the Tanderole Trail, along which lay his spread, was so far from civilization that it was almost a foreign outpost and was marked with a headstone every five miles."