Robert Olmstead

When Robey Childs's mother has a premonition about her husband, a soldier fighting in the Civil War, she does the unthinkable: she sends her only child to find his father on the battlefield and bring him home.
At fourteen, wearing the coat his mother sewed to ensure his safety—blue on one side, gray on the other— Robey thinks he's off on a great adventure. But not far from home, his horse falters and he realizes the enormity of his...

The year is 1916. The enemy, Pancho Villa, is elusive. The terrain is unforgiving, the intense heat and dust both relentless and overpowering. Through the mountains and across the long dry stretches of Mexico, Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, leads an expedition of inexperienced horse soldiers on seemingly fruitless searches. Napoleon has weathered the storms of battle with a toughness that has become like a second skin, with the Rattler, a horse...

The year is 1916. Napoleon Childs is an aging cavalryman who leads an expedition of inexperienced soldiers into Mexico to hunt down Pancho Villa and bring him to justice. The Patrol is brutally attacked and Napoleon is left by his captors to die in the desert. Through him we enter the conflicted mind of a warrior as he tries to survive, and the reasons a man would choose a life on the battlefield.

In September 1873, Elizabeth Coughlin, a widow bankrupted by her husband's folly and death, embarks on a buffalo hunt with her estranged and mysterious brother-in-law, Michael. With no money, no family, no job or security, she hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who depend on her. The buffalo hunt that her husband had planned, she now realizes, was his last hope for saving their land. Elizabeth...