He could have walked out on this earlier, could still walk. Rationality shrieked at him. "Let it go, Kincaid, get back on the road. Shoot the bridges, go to India. Stop in Bangkok on the way and look up the silk merchant's daughter who knows every ecstatic secret the old ways can teach. Swim naked with her at dawn in jungle pools and listen to her scream as you turn her inside out at twilight. Let go of this"—the voice was hissing now—"it's outrunning you." But the slow street tango had begun. Somewhere it played; he could hear it, an old accordion. It was far back, or far ahead, he couldn't be sure. Yet it moved toward him steadily. And the sound of it blurred his criteria and funneled his own alternatives toward unity. Inexorably it did that, until there was nowhere left to go, except toward Francesca Johnson....

With over 10 million copies sold, bestselling author Robert James Waller returns with another haunting, evocative story.

The wild places are where no one is looking anymore. Out on the high plains, among Sioux reservations and silent buttes, you can hear the wind. And on the back of the wind is the sound of an old accordion mingling with the lonely thump of a single drum in the nighttime and a far-off warrior’s cry.

To this, to a town called Salamander, comes Carlisle McMillan, a traveler and carpenter seeking a place of quiet amid the grinding roar of progress. There he finds two very different women: Gally Deveraux, who works at a diner and longs for something more than she is, and Susanna Benteen, beautiful and enigmatic, whom the town has labeled a witch. The women, Carlisle’s carpenter’s trade, and an old Indian known as Flute Player bring Carlisle a sense of contentment for a while. But his quiet is shattered as bulldozer treads begin to turn and the Yerkes County War commences.



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