When Vigil Cole and Everett Hitch arrive in Appaloosa, they find a small, dusty town suffering at the hand s of renegade rancher Randall Bragg, a man who has so little regard for the law that he has taken supplies, horses and women for his own and left the city marshall and one of his deputies for dead. Cole and Hitch, intinerant lawmen, are used to cleaning up after opportunisitic thieves, but in Bragg they find an unusually wily adversary-one who raises the stakes by playing not with the rules, but with emotions.