His name is Henry McCarty. One day the lad will be christened Billy the Kid and achieve world fame. But in 1875 he is just an obscure orphaned runaway traveling the Southwestern frontier. Enthralled with Hispanic culture and immersed in the twin arts of gambling and gunplay, Henry McCarty comes of age in boomtowns and barrios, in the wilds of the Chihuahua desert and the rugged high country of pine clad mountains.

After two years on the fertile training ground of an outpost named Camp Grant, a deadly encounter sends Henry back into the desert. An ominous journey follows, ultimately delivering him to Lincoln County, New Mexico, looking for redemption. He finds honest employment cowboying for a resolute young Englishman named John Tunstall, a twenty-three-year-old with an Oxford education and the world-weary look of a poet. But Henry quickly becomes entangled in the Londoner's wildly escalating mercantile dispute. To survive, he must navigate a Russian novel's wealth of characters and follow the tit for tat of a complex range war to its fiery conclusion.

Haunted by an Irish childhood in the slums of New York City, this strange boy possesses a stinging IQ and an epic grin, soaring ambitions and a fine tenor voice. When thrown into a hurricane of violence, Henry McCarty rises with an impassioned cause and a farsighted awareness of the machinery of fame and fate.