The Deliverance

In this newest of Richard Wheeler's Barnaby Skye chronicles, the earthy deserter from the Royal Navy, now a trapper, guide, and magnet for adventure, collects his Crow Indian wife Many Quills Woman (or "Victoria" as he calls her) and drifts south to Mexican territory.

At Bent's Fort on the Mexican frontier, Skye agrees to help Standing Alone, a mysterious Cheyenne woman, locate her two children who were kidnapped by Ute Indians several years before and sold into bondage in Mexico.

This impossible, dangerous, and foolhardy mission takes the three to Santa Fe and Taos and into a strange association with an eccentric Texas adventurer, Colonel Childress, who agrees to help them for reasons no one can guess.