Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens just lost his first election in seventeen years. Maybe folks in the Arizona Territory were ready for a change, and then again, maybe Stringer ought to go have a look-see. The trouble is that Perry has vanished and everyone who knew him is either dead or vanished too. But when hot lead and hard knuckles start flying, Stringer's belt-buckle deep in ghostly mystery and willing women. And even if the ghosts may be hokum, the women are flesh-and-blood beauties.

When Sheriff Owens loses the election for the first time in seventeen years, Stuart MacKail, a reporter for the San Francisco Sun, decides to investigate

The train robbery was bad. It cost Stringer thirty dollars. But when the Wild Bunch gives MacKail a .45 caliber invite to hear their side of what a nice bunch of boys they really are, it’s an offer he can’t refuse. After all, they’re all mothers’ sons, even if they would cut a man’s throat for his boots. Even so, when Stringer decides to ride along, it has less to do with an exclusive than the gun pointed at his back. And when the shooing starts, MacKail’s caught between the crossfire of a rabid posse and the meanest bunch of murdering, lying, cheating hombres to ever draw breath.

Everyone knows that Salton's Sink is the driest patch of greasewood in the whole damned Colorado Desert. So when a slick land syndicate promises cheap water to a pack of greenhorn settlers, Stringer is more than a mite suspicious. One booze-thirsty engineer knows the truth about International Irrigation, but he's six feet under with a chest full of lead. Just a drunk's bad luck? Maybe, but Stringer's hanging on to his Winchester because in the Colorado Desert, the cheapest piece of land a man can buy is an unmarked grave.

They say Judge Roy Bean has been up to some legal tomfoolery again. And it's MacKail's job to get the scoop on the infamous "hanging judge." But someone is out to stop Stringer—dead. Now it could be old Bean and some of his boys. Or maybe it's just another Lone Star gunslick with too much nerve and too little smarts. The only thing MacKail knows for sure is that newspaper men ain't welcome, especially not around Bean or his laughing pack of blood-simple coyotes. The only person who even says howdy is a south-of-the-border bandit about to turn revolutionary. But with Pancho Villa on your side, you don't need any enemies.

Only Pancho Villa, king of bandits, is gutsy enough to make war on Terrazas the Tyrant. And only Villa would sell tickets to one of his massacres. A curious mob settles along the Rio Grande, waiting for a bloodbath. They don't know that they've wasted their two bits on a phony war. Only one man is wise to Villa's crafty fake—Stringer MacKail. The adventurer-turned-newsman saddles a fast horse and tracks the real war to Mexico's sun-parched badlands. The desert erupts in a hellish inferno of torture and death as Villa's fearless gang shoots it out with Terraza's battle-scarred army. A murderous band of Yaqui warriors adds to the slaughter. It's a hell of a war. And a hell of a story—if Stringer lives to tell it.

Usually it takes Stringer a little while to rile folks in a new town. But no sooner does he step off the train in Tulsa than some sidewinder is doing his best to turn Stringer into yesterday's news. The hot story in Tulsa is the oil boom. It seems you can't dig a grave without hitting black gold. And Stringer's there to write the story. But MacKail's never seen such a sorry assortment of low-down, hornswoggling bushwhackers because, as Stringer well knows, where there's money, there's outlaws and lawyers—and sometimes it's hard to tell them apart.

For once they were sending Stringer on a nice easy assignment. All he had to do was scribble out a story about an outlaw gunned down fifty years before. As far as Stringer was concerned, it was an ideal excuse to make a trip back to his hometown in the Sierras. But it's a homecoming of hot lead and hotter ladies. Someone wants Stringer dead almost as bad as the local females want him alive. Stringer doesn't know why so much trouble is suddenly finding him, but he suspects it must be might ugly for the town to welcome a hometown boy with double dealing and easy death.

The way Stringer sees it, some cuss hard up for a laugh planted that news tip about Tombstone being flooded because that dusty town is about as dry as they come. But Stringer sure as hell ain't laughing when his newspaper boss sends him to Arizona to root out the truth. And the fast gun that's trying to kill him ain't kidding. And neither are the two lusty librarians who want to check him out. The only thing Stringer knows for certain is that Tombstone is a place where the truth can get twisted tighter than a hangman's knot.

Cheyenne, Wyoming, is a town that's leaping into the twentieth century spurs first. Pretty soon Cheyenne will be just as newfangled fancy as any Eastern city. But the folks there still know how to have fun. First the rodeo—and then the hanging. It's the rodeo that Stringer has been sent out to write about. However, before he knows it, he's up to his neck in the West's most notorious murder case. They're fixin' to hang Tom Horn, but something in town smells worse than a stable boy's boots, and Stringer aims to find out what it is.