New Mexico 1861: In the maelstrom of impending civil war, a detachment of light dragoons traverses a vast high-country wilderness, in search of a missing girl-child. Their various encounters among the local settlers, and native aboriginals, provide them with but a single clue surrounding the child's whereabouts, and the banished Comanche, who army scout Cobb has long fingered as kidnapper. A perilous expedition into the mythical Three Fingers country leads the troopers into a high heartland where privation dogs their every step. Attacked and decimated by warring Kiowa, the survivors then fall into a murderous entanglement with a renegade squad of mutineers - and, unwittingly, they play a guns-blazing role in the disruption of a covert rebel invasion. With the grim approval of the local Apaches, the soldiers continue their quest, and, in finally illuminating the fates of both child and abductor, they quickly learn how the very notions of greed, of ambition, of love, of honour - of the primal morality - stand fangs-drawn at the misty gates of onrushing civilization.