Captain Woodrow Call, Gus McCrae's old partner, once a youthful Texas Ranger, is now a bounty hunter hired to track down a brutal young Mexican bandit. Riding with Call are an Eastern city slicker, a witless deputy, and one of the last members of the Hat Creek outfit, Pea Eye Parker, now married to Lorena – once Gus's sweetheart.

Their long, perilous chase leads them across the last wild stretches of the West into a hellhole known as Crow Town and, finally, deep into the vast, relentless plains of the Texas frontier.