As a boy he had a look of gaunt horror about him.

As a man he had the cold look of the eternal searcher.

The boy walked out of the wilderness in the late summer of 1855, carrying the sun-blackened remains of a jack rabbit he had been eating on for two days. He had been alone in there for ten days.

Behind him he had left three graves. With him always was the memory of a family named Snelling, that he would one day hunt down and destroy - slowly, terribly.

The boy became a man, bleak-eyed and dangerous, a man named Ed Cushman who rode, always alone, carrying only the grim comfort of a black memory. Searching, always searching.

Murder lay at the end of his trail. Murder, and a girl he loved.