The Civil War is a recent burning memory as Jedediah Whitney, a battle-weary Union Army cavalry officer, rides north through Texas toward his new duty station in Kansas. Pursuing him is the psychotic Bogen Panecek whose cadet son's pre-war suicide he blames on Jed, teaching at West Point at the time. On the Texas prairie, with hostile Comanches threatening, Jed reluctantly takes up with a rough, one legged Rebel cavalryman, Stump Hampton.In the Texas chaparral the unlikely pair stumble upon a traumatized five-year-old girl, Penny, the sole survivor of a barbarous massacre of a party of emigrants. Pinned to her dress is a bloody note: Penelope mi hija Santa Fe E. Guzmán. And below that, a scrawled signature: Carmelita Stiehler. The girl's dead mother lies nearby.Without hesitation, the two soldiers accept her into their care and take her with them on their journey north. The girl, for days in the saddle with Stump, stares speechlessly into the distance, while the soldiers' war-toughened hearts soften in sympathy for her.Jed learns Penny, with no living relatives, is the sole heir to the vast Baca rancho east of Santa Fe. The family had lost the rancho to swindlers before the Mexican War but at the time of the massacre in Texas were on their way back to New Mexico, now a US Territory, in an attempt to recover it in the courts.A shady Santa Fe business man, Lorcan Murphy, has for years been stealing the property of old New Mexican families with land titles, like Penny's, dating back to Spanish times. Using violent intimidation in some cases, Murphy had taken advantage of weak and corrupt law enforcement to force the legitimate owners off their land. He has also added the Baca rancho to his empire.But Penny now has hard men to support her cause, armed men who have been conditioned by years of the death and destruction of war, men loyal enough to kill for her, to risk their lives for her.
