In the Pacific Northwest, the outlaw era does not end with a clean moral lesson. It ends with exhaustion, hunger, and the sound of boots on a station platform. Harry Tracy breaks loose, and the territory reacts like a single organism. Sheriffs wire ahead. Deputies read telegrams with clenched jaws. Towns lock their doors before the sun fully sets. The papers print his name until it feels like weather. Some see a monster. Some see a man who refuses to kneel. Tracy sees only distance and the thin hope that speed can outpace the net forming behind him. Smoke & Iron follows the early days of the pursuit, when the chase still feels possible, when allies still exist, when a bold move can buy another night. Yet every mile Tracy takes forces a response, and each response tightens the system that will eventually crush him. The frontier here is not a romantic backdrop. It is a working landscape of rail spurs, trestles, wheat fields, boarding houses, and hard-eyed communities that have learned what violence costs. This is historical fiction drawn from the documented manhunt for Harry Tracy. Where the record breaks or contradicts itself, the story imagines motives and conversations to create a coherent dramatic arc, while keeping the texture of the era honest. If you like Westerns with pressure, pace, and moral weight, Smoke & Iron is your entry point into a trilogy about the last outlaw and the last breath of a dying world.