Barnabas Locke, seasoned frontiersman, husband and father, becomes strangely embroiled in international competition for gold illegally mined in the Ute mountains of Colorado. Among the converging players is his cousin, Captain Enoch Locke, sent on a secret mission to confiscate the gold. Guilty of the escape of an unscrupulous French schemer, Barnabas and his life-long friend, the Abenaki Prophet, Squando, hatch a daring plan to thwart the gold seekers and to restore spiritual balance to the Ute way of life. Old associates, French mercenaries, treacherous villains, one ambitious young warrior and a very old heroic one, two indomitable Ute women, spirited horses and a protective dog each play a part in the events unleashed by white men's greed and the vengeful ire of the Ancient Ones. The reader rides along on a perilous journey by keelboat down the Ohio River, a buffalo stampede, an earthquake, armed standoffs, escapes, plots, and murders with a strain of the mystical and a touch of romance in a story true to the American West.