Thunder Moon had ridden his great stallion, Sailing Hawk, a thousand miles. Soon he would reach his goal - the home of Colonel Sutton and his wife, his biological parents. Twenty years before, a Cheyenne chief, Big Hard Face, had kidnapped the Suttons' infant son, taking the child to his lodge, where he had brought him up as his own. As the years passed, the boy, Thunder Moon, earned a reputation as the finest young warrior of the Suhtai, one of the tribes of the Cheyenne nation.

William Sutton, raised as the Cheyenne warrior Thunder Moon, finds himself caught between his white true father, Colonel Sutton, and his loyalty to his Indian foster father, Old December.