Half-frozen and nearly dead, Gil Ryan rode into the little mountain town of Larkspur just ahead of a raging late-winter blizzard. He'd lost just about everything he owned when his pack horse fell through the ice on the Big Sandy River. Racked with fever and only recently healed from a gunshot wound, he was seeking a warm place to wait out the storm. But Gil had no way of knowing the surrounding Ensillado Basin was about to be plunged into a range war, or that the man whose bullet he'd carried was also in the Ensillado, leading an army of hired guns to rid the valley of its homesteaders. Barely recovered, Gil is hired by the town to bring order to the basin. But there's more at play here than he originally realized, and Gil soon finds himself in the battle of his life, the stakes a kindly doctor's loyalty and a good woman's love . . . assuming the town doesn't turn on him when the bullets start to fly.