Deputy Marshal McClain is found in his home, kneeling over his dead wife's body, holding the bloody knife that had killed her. Accused of her murder, he escapes from jail and stumbles across evidence pointing to her killers. So begins a long manhunt that takes him from Arizona to the Texas Gulf Coast and a town on the shores of Laguna Madre. There tangling with the Skeltons, a family of bootleggers, brings to McClain more startling information that sees him heading back to Arizona. Tormented by guilt, he at last meets his wife's killer, and deals with him in a way he would never have expected.
