Until the night of the fire, Stanton, Montana, was a peaceful town. It boasted a church, a school and a bank, and no longer attracted those hard-riding, hard-drinking characters who brought with them the kind of lawlessness and destruction that had been rife during its earlier frontier days. Its marshal, Silas Tasker, rejoiced in the knowledge that he had rid the town of the kind of rip-roaring reputation attributed to so many other cattle-towns across the west. But in the aftermath of the blaze that destroyed the barn on the Diamond-H ranch, a man lost his sanity, others died and Silas found himself confronted with a feud capable of developing into an unstoppable range-war.