This trio of short novels opens with "Plunder Trail", the story of a wagon train that splits at a fork on the Oregon Trail. In "The Brand of Penasco", Senorita Scorpion trails her rustled cattle and finds herself in the border town of Oro Peso without a horse. And although "The Shadow in Renegade Basin" is probably caused by a mineral deposit, what it looks like is blood. It is to this basin that the Shane brothers come with their ailing mother to build a homestead, ignoring the curse placed on the land when treachery wiped out all the residents but one.