Description

He signed on to protect a legend. He ended up protecting the truth.

Broke, tired, and down to his last three pennies, Eldridge Sample takes a job that no self-respecting gunfighter would touch: bodyguard for a traveling wild west show run by a professional widow.

Jenny Jackson is selling a story. She claims her late husband, Major Lucius Jackson, was the "Hero of the Plains," a man who single-handedly held off a Comanche war party to save a settlement. But Sample remembers the Major differently. He remembers a coward who slept through the Battle of Shiloh while his men died in the mud.

Despite his better judgment, Sample joins the troupe—a drunk juggler, a runaway rope artist, and the sharp-tongued widow—as they tour the dusty mining camps of West Texas. But when a real Comanche raiding party attacks the wagons, Sample discovers that the show is built on more than just lies.

Uncovering a trail of brand-new Henry repeating rifles sold to the very warriors terrorizing the frontier, Sample realizes he's stumbled onto a conspiracy that leads straight to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Now, caught between a corrupt government agent desperate to bury the evidence and a widow determined to turn a massacre into a headline, Sample must decide whether to walk away or rewrite the script with a Colt .45.

"The truth is messy," Sample said. "That's why people pay for the lie."