In "Trap of Gold," Wetherton has been three months out of Horsehead before he finds his first color. The gold is located at the head of a fan that lies in a gigantic crack in a granite upthrust that resembles a fantastic ruin. This crumbling granite is slashed with a vein of quartz that is literally laced with gold! The problem is that the granite upthrust is unstable, and taking out the quartz might bring the whole thing tumbling down.

"Trail to Pie Town"

"Trail to Pie Town" finds Dusty Barron riding his steel-dust stallion at full gallop out of town. Back in the town a man lies bleeding on the floor of a saloon. Dan Hickman had called him yellow and gone for a gun. Dan was a mite slow, a fact that had left him dead on the saloon floor. Maybe if Emmett Fisk and Gus Mattis hadn't appeared just as he was making a break from the saloon, he could have explained himself, but they reached for their guns when they saw him, and he had wheeled his horse and hit the desert road. The dead man had several relatives in the area, and now it looked like he was going to be facing a clan war.