Johnny McLane was born in South Hampton County, Virginia, on the eve of the turbulent decade before the American Civil War. Attempting to fulfill his deceased father's dream, Johnny travels westward alone across the high plains coming upon the fledgling settlement of Sideling in the Wyoming territory. There, he is drawn into a formidable realm of spiritual, social, and political unrest. The stoic marshal reluctantly hires the unpretentious twenty year old as an apprentice peace officer, and Johnny immediately collides with the settlement's deviant vagrant, intriguing young school marm, and a cattleman's fiery daughter. Although the Emancipation Proclamation is now the law of the land granting freedom and equality to all men, Johnny recognizes that many, including himself, remain enslaved by the masters of lust, power, greed, prejudice, and fear. The traumas of war have left him weary and the mores of his upbringing seem insufficient to sustain him. Trapped in a tangled web of deceit and haunted by his past, there seems no way to escape. Subtly, inner promptings urge him to believe that he may have exchanged his father's ultimate truth of freedom for a lie.