"There is a constant feeling that something is wrong beneath the surface. Even when Mercer is inside a fort, talking to superior officers, or standing among people who are supposed to be on his side, the story rarely feels completely safe."

The payroll was missing. That was the fact everyone wanted Mercer to accept it. Men had been killed. Gold had disappeared. The frontier offered a hundred places where both could vanish forever. It would have been easier if the evidence agreed with this premis. But it did not. Mercer studied what had been left behind and then what hadn’t. Too little blood. Too few tracks. Records that should have existed and somehow did not. Somebody wanted the Army searching for stolen go