Homesteaders in a small Texas settlement had a hard life but a gruff clergyman proved helpful. They knew him as "the Parson" and assumed he was an itinerant preacher, but he was something more. The challenges of frontier life in the 1870s pit men and women against the forces of mother nature, human nature, and their own spiritual struggles. The more the parson became involved in their lives, the more they came to believe that he walked with God.