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After a seven-year absence, lifelong friends Buell Mace and Simon Steele return to the town they grew up in. Carlisle, Nebraska in 1879 is trying to become a more genteel and law abiding place than the one a hot-headed Buell had been encouraged to leave at the age of nineteen. Sheriff Lorin Staker is one of the first people Buell talks to on returning, and Buell is amazed when he offers Buell a badge. The sheriff is having trouble with drifters, "Islanders" as they're called, who're camped on a five-hundred-acre sandbar three miles down the Platte River. Buell turns him down, his disdain for authority deeply seated. He does, however, ride out to take a look at the camp.