The Ridgeway family faces their greatest challenge when a devastating drought threatens to spark an open range war, forcing them to fight for their ranch, their dream--and their lives . . . It's the summer of 1883. A severe drought threatens to bankrupt the Ridgeway's Rocking R Ranch and every rancher in northwest Texas. The cattle are thirsty and hungry. The ranchers are getting desperate. And a simple new invention called barbed wire--the devil's rope--is their only defense against illegal herders grazing on their land. Percy Ridgeway and his brother Eli are working overtime to stake a fence around their sixty thousand acres. But someone keeps cutting the wires. The Ridgeways keep fixing them. And soon Perry is tangled in a high-stakes showdown with a thieving cattleman named Northcutt and his cutthroat henchmen. Let the battle begin . . . History would call it the Fence Wars of 1883. The Ridgeways would call it the summer they fought back--come hell or dry water.