Choosing sides... Wanted for a murder he didn't commit, Gordon Hawkes has spent more than thirty years hiding away in his Rocky Mountain refuge. Hardened by time and grief-stricken over the death of his wife, Hawkes has one joy in life: his daughter, Grace, the recent bride of Captain Brand Gunnison of the Colorado Volunteers.
When the army asks Gunnison to set up an outpost in hostile Cheyenne country, it places Hawkes' last surviving family member in the gravest of perils. The legendary mountain man knows that the only way to ensure his daughter's safety is to join the campaign, even though he loathes the army's brutal, senseless dealings with the "Indian scourge."
But the army has badly underestimated their foes, and as a bloody whirlwind descends upon the plains, Hawkes must choose sides once and for all -- and fight for the treasure he values most: his family.
2002 by Jason Manning Signet (New York) 316 pp ISBN: 0-451-20583-9
The final book in the Gordon Hawkes saga, opening with a prologue in which I reviewed what had happened before. Like the previous two Hawkes novels, this one unfolds against the backdrop of the Indian wars -- more specifically, in this instance, the Fetterman Massacre -- and was, I thought, a satisfactory conclusion to the saga I had begun four years earlier.