FRAMED as a horse thief, Maffitt went through hell to reach Mexico – Then found he'd ridden straight into hell!

Nelson Nye, the rancher writer, brings his Spur Award-winning gift for describing the Western landscape with accuracy few others ever achieved, creating fresh new plots, and engaging, identifiable characters, to this unforgettable novel of an innocent man forced to ride the wild plains for his life. 

It wasn't a journey that anyone would make willingly. But Dale Maffitt had little choice. Wanted for hanging on a trumped-up charge of horse-stealing, trailed by a relentless posse, Maffitt's only hope lay in Mexico. To live, he must ride fast and hard over the scorching Texas plains and beat the posse to the border. Once across, he would be safe from arrest, and the posse would have to turn back. So Dale Maffitt begins a grueling race across one of most merciless, drought stricken patches of Hell in the USA - the Texas barrens - trying to stay one step ahead of the posse. Every mile of the way was a battle with pitiless heat, hunger, thirst, perilous storms, and often the posse itself. What he did not know was that if at last he made it to Mexico, it would only be to discover true Hell had always waited ahead of him - and not behind!