After spending an unknown number of days caged, chained, and tortured by men wearing hoods in the darkness of a root cellar who insist he robbed a bank and killed several women, twenty-five-year-old Ben Hawthorne is rescued by four men. But who are these men and why were they looking for him -- the son of Eli and Cora Hawthorne, born on a ranch outside of Nacogdoches, Texas, orphaned at the age of ten when his parents were killed by Comanches, and then taken by the Comanches who gave him his Indian name, Newcomer.