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Ike Parsons is the sheriff of a small Montana town, with a reputation for fairness, common sense, and kindness. When he hears that Chas Stubblefield has fallen on hard times in the bitter winter, he heads out to the rancher's spread to offer assistance. What Ike finds shocks him to the core: cattle starving in the snow, or freezing where they stand, and a brooding Stubblefield near bankruptcy, living off the meat of his dying herd, too proud to accept help. Stubblefield is the heir of an old Montana family; Ike, a Wisconsin native, came west to marry the daughter of another rancher. As sheriff, Ike is something of an outsider, caught between one rancher's rights and the larger law of the community. His attempt to help backfires, and Ike is troubled to learn that Chas is gathering support in town among people who believe that a man's land and property are his own to use as he chooses. But Ike does not know that the rancher is planning revenge, a plot that will target Ike's wife, Pattiann, a woman with a past her husband does not fully understand, a past in which Chas Stubblefield figured intimately.