A crew of ten, led by an anthropologist, was going into Arizona's Chaco Canyon to dig for relics of the Anasazi. But even before they started digging, members of the crew started dying.

"Sheep were on the move and the tempers of hard-pressed cowmen were on the rise. Drought had hit them hard, losses were high, and being sheeped out would ruin them completely. For reasons of their own, the U. S. Forestry Service wanted trouble stirred up between the beef riders and the mutton punchers. They figured it would force Congress to give them what they were after. And they thought they had their trouble-maker in the escaped killer, Pete McGrath....

Because Smiling Smith was a peace-loving man, he kept his guns hanging on the wall of his new badlands ranch. He'd bought that isolated layout for that very reason--without cattle or improvements nobody should have designs on the place...Only it didn't work that way.

"Had the man who arrived in Tonto Basin on the night Juke Ronstadt was murdered been an ordinary cowpuncher, the forces out to grab a cattle empire very likely would have killed him. But he was Bufe Telldane, ex-lawman, ex-outlaw, and about the deadliest man with a gun. So they tried their hands at framing him"--