Lauran Paine returns with all the characteristic magic and power of his Western stories and their universal themes of learning from experience, respecting nature, and changing times and attitudes. In "Terror Trail" Reno Balfor is a small rancher constantly at odds with Arnold Gregory. In "Holding the Ace Card," Lou Bellanger is a gunfighter who has not seen his mother since he was a small child when she placed him with a foster family. Now he has accepted an assignment to become involved in a range war in which the person hiring him is Judith Hudson, his mother, who has since remarried and now has two small children.