Chance Hollister is hired to find a young girl who followed her husband to the gold fields of Colorado. Her mother has not heard from her daughter, Lucy, in three years and is not well; she wants the girl to come home before it is too late. Chance thinks the search is a lost cause but cannot turn the woman down. He follows the girl's trail from Missouri to Colorado and finally to the lead mining region of Kansas. He finds Lucy, now a widow who did not want her mother to know how she had been living in the years since she left home. Doctor Harley Mortimore left his sweetheart to study abroad, unaware that she was carrying his child. Years later, he returns, a bitter and resentful man who finally learns of the daughter he never knew he had. In his earlier occupation as a lawman, Chance brought in an outlaw who spent six years in prison and vowed to give the detective a bullet for each year he was behind bars; he's out now, and determined to follow through with his plan for revenge. All these people will converge in Deadhorse. 57,500 words