The Santa Fe Trail passes through the West's most savage lands. That's why a wealthy trader hires the mountain man called Preacher to keep his goods safe - and deliver a flock of pilgrims to a Promised Land. A young prostitute and the spoiled son of the wagon train owner are among the souls Preacher must protect. But then a rifle goes off at the wrong moment. A towering grizzly bear attacks. And both outlaws and Comanches ambush the wagon train ....

This book pits the legendary Pancho Villa, a much-feared outlaw and revolutionary, against a thrill-seeking railroad tycoon known as the Colonel, whose fading fortune is tied up in a colossal ranch in Chihuahua, Mexico. But when Villa kidnaps the Colonel's grandchildren in the midst of a cattle drive, and absconds into the Sierra Madre, the aging New England patriarch and his adopted son head to El Paso, hoping to find a group of cowboys brave enough...