The novel opens with three outlaw companions entrenched in a fortified adobe in the Sonora desert, their lives shaped by rustling and lawlessness. When an outsider joins them he is tested in loyalty and skill as cross-border raids and reprisals escalate. Romantic entanglements, schemes between a burly conspirator and a widowed woman, and internal betrayals intensify tensions. A sequence of ambushes, fires, and a mysterious night death push characters toward reckonings; the narrative follows cycles of violence, attempts at settlement, and the moral consequences that determine the final fates of the three.