The Rainbow Trail

The Rainbow Trail is a novel by the American writer Zane Grey, published in 1915 and a sequel to Riders of the Purple Sage.

John Shefford is a young man who has been told about the woman in the canyon by the people who lost her, and he sets out to find the trail that leads to the hidden village where she is kept. The country he crosses is the canyons and mesas of the American southwest, and the novel spends a good deal of its length on the travelling: water, rock, distances and the tracks that can be read by somebody who knows how. The book's opposition is between a community that enforces its own law on women and a man with no weapon and no authority, and Grey keeps the resolution inside the landscape rather than in a courtroom.

It followed Riders of the Purple Sage, and the characters of the earlier book are part of the story of what happened to them afterwards, in country that had less room for them than before.