While on their way home to Walnut Grove after a trip to Mankato, the Ingalls family are unexpectedly snowbound, with little food, at a remote mountain cabin by a late-spring blizzard. But a desperate situation soon turns deadly when a renegade U.S. Marshall, blinded by hate, shows up half-frozen at their door, only moments ahead of the man he has vowed to bring back dead: a Sioux Indian chief who has just saved Charles' life.
—shepherd1138