Thomas O'Reiley, a wealthy and highly successful San Francisco businessman had spent five desperate, daunting years as a young man isolated on a South Pacific island. After his audacious return to San Francisco in 1896, O'Reiley married the only girl he had ever cherished, the beautiful Amanda McPherson. During these early years of the twentieth century, the United States is busy flexing its newly-found muscles, from the far-Western Pacific through Central America to the Caribbean. Meanwhile, prominent politicians and scandalous entrepreneurs were determined to sabotage one of the United States' greatest engineering feats, the construction of the inter-ocean canal through the Isthmus of Panama. This loose alliance of vicious men and formidable politicians employ inside sources, corruption and murder in a daring conspiracy to satisfy their greed. O'Reiley is gradually drawn into a covert effort to prevent the assassination of President Theodore Roosevelt. But O'Reiley is troubled by his life and the trappings of success that camouflage his own uncertainties, longings and suppressed yearnings. His efforts to acknowledge and confront his passions and wanderlust lead to near-tragedy in the high Sierras. They are avoided only through his rediscovery of peace and solitude, his total acceptance by a ranching family and the mysterious encounter with a fugitive Indian shaman in the California Sierras that thrusts his life in a new direction.