He had outrun every marshal the federal court at Cheyenne could send. Then Walker Davis came up the road.

Eli Creed has been on the wrong side of the law for most of his thirty years. By the time the federal court at Cheyenne sends Marshal Walker Davis after him, the bounty men have stopped riding south, the papers have stopped going up in the territory, and the country has settled into a kind of quiet that is not quite peace.

Walker Davis is not like the other marshals.

He rides alone. He reads the country before he reads the paper. He has buried five of Eli's men in three weeks the fall before. And when the long hunt finally narrows them both down to a single rifle shot at fifty yards, Walker chooses something neither man can yet name.

Walker's choice will set Eli on a road for nine years. The order Walker gives at the end of that hunt — three weeks later, on a road south of a town called Silas — will travel further than either of them ever rode.

There is a woman at the saloon door in Two Pines who has been waiting for an answer Eli has not come back to give. There are friends Eli will lose before the year is out. There is a marshal's wife at a porch in Cheyenne who will name her son for the man at the funnel.

The road is not done with any of them.

A literary Western in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, and Louis L'Amour.

Book One of the Eli Creed Trilogy.