They were cat and mouse. Antagonists in a deadly game of survival, Ward Cameron and William Olive were linked together by the most fearful word in the West: bounty. Olive was a thrice-hardened Foreign Legionnaire turned bounty-hunter. And Cameron was a fugitive with a newly minted price on his head. An ex-Confederate officer, Cameron had murdered a carpet bagger tax-collector in a fit of rage. As if punished by the gods, he was pursued by a man seeking his life with all the appetite of a starving mountain lion -- a brutal deserter from the Legionnary detachment in Mexico supporting Emperor Maximilian; a profession killer artfully trained in the craft of violence ... and whose one hope for survival lay in Cameron's death.