Big Bob's Boys

He walked from Alabama to Texas on a name and a hope.
When Gerry and Robert Croft pull a half-dead young man from a dry creek bed on the south pasture, they ask two questions: who is he, and what brought him this far on foot? Neil Billings of Calhoun County, Alabama has answers to both. He is looking for his brother Mance, last seen in San Antonio fourteen months ago, and he has been walking south and west ever since the letters stopped coming.
What follows Neil Billings is something else entirely.
Within a week of his arrival at the Croft ranch, two flat-eyed men appear on the south road asking questions. Their name is Hale. They say Neil killed their father in a Missouri trading post and that they have followed him a thousand miles to settle the account. Neil's version of events in that trading post is different from theirs. Gerry Croft believes Neil's version. That decision puts the ranch between a man running from his past and the men who intend to make certain he has no future.
From the river crossing at Eagle Pass to a labor operation in Uvalde County where men disappear into the brush country and are not seen again, Dead Man's Walk follows the Croft brothers and the woman Gerry intends to marry into the hard and complicated country south of the caprock, where the answers to simple questions are never simple and the cost of doing right is always higher than the cost of looking away.
Written in the clipped, declarative voice of the great western novelists, Dead Man's Walk is a story about what a man owes a stranger, what a stranger carries that he cannot set down, and what it costs a family of people on a working ranch to stand between one and the other when the trouble comes riding in from both directions at once.