"Rusty decided to leave after supper, under the cover of darkness when cool evening air would make travel less of a hardship and more of an adventure ..." So begins fourteen-year-old Russell Starke's tale of leaving home to fulfill his dream to become a cowboy-and to find his runaway brother. The year is 1916, the dawn of a new age of transportation in a country on the brink of war, and Rusty's odyssey takes him from the motorcar-clogged streets of his Indiana home to the endless prairies of Kansas. He finds himself in a world where people who have forgotten how to dream are quick to tell him how to run his life. He must learn fast that seduction is not love, a romantic notion of the past is not a promise for the future, the kindness of strangers is not always to be feared, and love is something shown, not words spoken. Rusty discovers that the Wild West is more wonderful-and more dangerous-than he ever could have imagined.