Desperate for water, Gil's drive is forced into a deadly confrontation between the Paneequa tribe and surveyors, over the Lake of the Haunted Hills. The valley's ghostly winds and geysers are sacred to the tribe, while the U.S. Army survey is headed by a stubborn Indian killer Captain, who orders a Paneequa woman tortured. Gil hopes his drover Tasunka, who left the tribe as a teen, can mediate the dispute with minimal bloodshed, but when Gil finds that the local White settlement Heliotrope is a ghost town due to the dispute, the trail boss tells Rowdy to take over the drive in case he is killed.