Up to now the good people of Winton, Oregon had done a lot of things right. The town was prosperous, the buildings well-constructed and in a good state of repair. The law was upheld and all seemed orderly. The elderly judge was eloquent in his praise for the respectable nature of the citizens.
Trouble was, just before the man called Edge rode in to town, things had started to go all wrong. A woman had been brutally murdered and a man hurriedly tried and hanged. The wrong man.
And now a person or persons unknown had set up a protest movement. Not by waving banners but by setting up nooses. And beginning to kill, one by one, all the people responsible.
That was when bad law became lynch law and the formerly neatly swept streets became all littered with the bodies of those recently responsible people.