Eleven hundred head. Two hundred and eighty miles. Forty-seven days to pay a debt that was never hers. Wyoming Territory, August 1883. Lena Garrity buried her husband in May, and in August a letter from the bank tells her that the note on the Lone Cottonwood falls due on the thirtieth of September, in Cheyenne, in full. The only way to raise the money is to drive her herd south to the railhead, across country where the big cattlemen make the rules and the brand inspector keeps the book. She hires what she can get: a foreman with three fingers and a long silence, a boy who cannot read, a cook who quotes Cervantes, a retired cavalryman who watches every ridge, and an old drunk with a fiddle whose granddaughter will not be left behind. Somebody on the trail knows what her husband was doing the day he died. Somebody is feeding the other side. And every river, every well and every night camp brings her a little closer to an answer she may not want. The grass is wide. The ground is not.