Western Heritage Award-winning authorSpur Award-winning authorLevi Strauss' Golden Saddleman Award-winning author Jesse Alden Wilder chose to fight Indians on the plains as a "galvanized" Yankee rather than languish in a Union prison. Ostracized by his family and neighbors as a traitor to the South, he winds up in Tucson where he meets Mrs. Susan Andrews Lattimore who is looking for someone to rescue her young son from the Apaches. In the process of the rescue, Jesse and Susan fall in love. Returning to the East so that Susan could obtain a divorce, Jesse returns to Tennessee where he learns that local bias toward him is still strong, but the community is being threatened by a band of renegades that wear white sheets and have been burning out and murdering residents in a reign of terror.
