Simon Steele and his friend, Buell Mace, leave home at nineteen, Simon because there's no reason to stay and Buell because there's every reason to run. At a roadhouse outside Fort Laramie, Wyoming Territory, where there are few rules and even fewer consequences if you break one, Simon finds work as the house's supply man and Buell as an enforcer. Hanging tenaciously to the morals of his parents, and to the memory of the woman who rejected him, Simon conflicts with the more pragmatic and volatile Buell. Over the course of four years we see life as it was on the frontier in 1869, where the US Army set the rules and lawless men broke them. People sought pleasure wherever they could and Simon's job was to provide those pleasures. He seeks advice and comfort from three people: an old prospector, a Shoshoni Indian and a woman who cooks for the saloon. Not enough, he slowly degrades, until, in a final act of violence, Simon kills a man he knew and trusted. Buell conspires with witnesses to take the blame and both leave to make peace with their consciences, one traveling north, the other west.