The second in a series of short novels featuring Jeff Boon, a Confederate Civil War veteran who leaves his war-torn home with a group of settlers, intending to start over in Oregon. Jeff and the settlers spend the winter in Missouri, preparing to leave for the West in the spring. But tensions flare between the settlers and anti-Confederate locals, and between Jeff and Abe Hackett. Abe, who shot a man down in cold blood a few weeks earlier in Tennessee and is willing to turn one settler against another to get what he wants.