The main events of the novel are set in a fictional Idaho town in 1886/7: an orphan girl's adoptive father is murdered by a brutal villain. With a hired gunman's help she takes her revenge. These events are witnessed by a group a travellers, one of whom, a budding journalist, falls in love with the girl. Though they don't always know it, the lives of the gunman, the other travellers and some of the townspeople overlap both then and across time.