Wyoming Territory, 20 July 1889, Billy Cotton stumbles across a lynching about to take place in a hidden gulch. The victims are a couple of homesteaders, Ellen Watson and James Avery. The lynchers are six cattle barons who despise the way homesteaders are breaking up the open grazing land they see as their own. In the stand off that follows will Billy be able to save the innocent couple or will the cattle barons prevail and commit "one of the most bare-faced outrages ever committed in the territory"?