In the year 1880, an impoverished, half-English journalist named Eduardo Dawson, hitching from Mexico for the American border, meets three fellow travelers who could not be more different. The first is Phoebe Surgener, a wry, strong-willed American ranch lady of obvious wealth and influence. The second is Pleasant Honeyflower, a seedy, fast-talking phony preacher. The third is Marcela Sandoval, a magically beautiful Mexican shepherdess. After their meeting on the road, there follows a seemingly endless night that begins with friendly "get-to-know-you" chatter and evolves as they cross the desert under a great blood moon into episodes of passionate young love, depraved sexual violence, betrayal, and abandonment that will have unimaginable repercussions for years to come. As fate will have it, they all end up in Pleasant Valley, Arizona, and their chance encounter in the desert will turn out to be a harbinger of The Pleasant Valley War, the bloodiest land war in the history of the American West.