Garet Havelock, Vulture City's marshal, attempts to stop the theft of $100,000 in bullion from the Vulture Mine headquarters. An old nemesis, Barnabas Donovan, is responsible and leaves a trail of dead behind him. A kidnapping, gunfights with Indians, and chasing the gold bring the marshal to meet the one woman he can't forget and forces choices on him no man should have to make. Now, Havelock must survive the Apache “run of death,” and face Donovan's gunslingers to get back the gold. Chapter One The stench of death clung to the dry earth of Vulture City, a patch of hell on the Mojave Desert. The town's burgeoning jumble of dugouts, tarpaper shacks, and batten-on-plank houses fanned out from a plaza bordered by Garth's Mercantile and Vulture Mine headquarters, the Carrion Saloon, the Vulture Hotel, and the marshal's office and jail. One street leading from the plaza ended at the Vulture Mine. Gold sweetened the smell of death; pretty, plentiful gold from the Vulture Mine – the richest in Arizona, maybe the richest in the West. The stamp-mill crushed the ore sweated from the mother lode and separated the precious metal from the quartz. Men with greed etched on their faces melted down the gold and poured it into forms for ingots—an inch thick, three inches wide, and ten long. Each weighed about twenty-two ounces at fineness of just over nine hundred.