1885: The once beautiful Benevolence, wasted with cancer, traces her ex-husband, John Henry Summerfield, a gunman on the run, to the tiny town of Los Angeles, California. Bound to a wheelchair, with only a few weeks to live, she informs him that a gang of outlaws has kidnapped her daughters and granddaughters from their ranch in Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory. The oldest daughter is the baby girl he deserted twenty years earlier to fight for the Union against the rebels; the younger daughter, sired by a second husband, has been either murdered or sold into prostitution, her prepubescent...

Set in the glitter and grime of Reno, in the saintliness and severity of Salt Lake City and in the defiant and dissipated streets of Philadelphia, the Percolators are up to their necks in big rig trucking, Latter Day Saints proselytizing and racial strife. Truck drivers, Ace and Him, graduates from the school of hard knocks, discover prosperity never trickles down, so according to their logic it can only percolate up. The odd couple soon find out that knowing how the trickle works and making it work are not the same, for at the bottom lies a humanity with the strength of used coffee grounds....

In 1859 violence ruled the nation, recruiting innocence and requiring it to bend its knee. An unforeseen recruit appeared in the shape of a nineteen-year old antebellum boy reporting for his first day of work in an unsettled part of western Virginia. His only assets were a quick tongue, a likable wit, and obstinacy to bending his knee. In the span of two hours, violence--in the shape of a boss's mule club-strikes at an iron foundry. Iron workers strike, ejecting the boy into a thirty-year odyssey, running from the hanging rope. Violence threw Crazy Ol' Brown and Harpers Ferry at him; threw...