Traveling to Boston on a stagecoach, Ken Parker meets eclectic characters who introduce themselves as Violette Fauvel, a singer with a deliberately French accent, Amos Clay, a pharmacist, and Steven J. Hackett, a cloth salesman. After a stop in which Ken gives a severe lesson to two henchmen, he is welcomed in Stockton as a sort of national hero, complete with a banner and a marching band. Is it all the result of a huge misunderstanding?
Prologue: a sheriff is roaming the prairie with the owner of a herd from which forty cows have been stolen. Having believed to find them inside a Kiowa village they carry out a real massacre from which only a boy is saved, because he is white. Then, looking carefully at the beasts, they realize that they are not the ones they were looking for. A week later, in Culver City, Kansas, Ken Parker acrobatically stops the horses of a coach left without a guide: it is the announcement of a series of massacres organized by Naika, the Kiowa chief.
