The Eye of Dread

A Wisconsin town at the end of the Civil War: two cousins quarrel by the river, one of them vanishes, and the other runs west believing he has killed him. Years later a man calling himself Harry King comes back from a mountain claim, somebody notices a resemblance, and the last third of the book is the arrest and the trial. Erskine wrote deliberately against the standard frontier plot: the drama is the courtroom, not the gunfight. Fifty-nine plates of storm landscapes and old battles by painters including Ivan Shishkin and Horace Vernet run through the book, matching the weather and the reckoning that hang over the town.