The impoverished young lives of Yolanda Flores, a vaquero's daughter of Kinney County, Texas, and Ignacio Salazar, an orphan from Mexico, intertwine in adversarial ways with the post Civil War Cavalrymen of Fort Clark and area citizens.

Due to the violence of the times, and more recent uneasiness along the border, their timely story is not for the faint hearted reader. It involves all strata of society who lived at the time in the wild Nueces Strip stretching along the Mexican border.