For years Johnny Pearl tried to escape his demons by being a gunslinger. With his killer's cool and famous pearl-handled pistol, he made a name for himself in the years following the Civil War as an outlaw. But fame has proved hollow, and Johnny finds himself on the outskirts of the Wyoming Territory, on the verge of taking his own life after one gunfight too many, until he finds redemption in the smile of Katie Small Dove.

Katie understands Johnny Pearl's pain and helps heal his broken soul, giving him the strength to turn his back on his old life of death and destruction, and build a new future. Within a year he has a wife, a homestead, and a baby on the way, and for the first time in his life Johnny knows true happiness. Of course it can not last.

Johnny Pearl's idyllic new world is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by the arrival of Captain Antioch Drake, a psychotic cavalry officer determined to avenge the recent massacre at Little Big Horn. Within minutes of Drake and his men arriving, the homestead is ablaze, his wife and unborn child cruelly slain, and Johnny left to hang from a cottonwood.

Normally, this would be the end of Johnny Pearl's story - if not for the unexpected appearance of a medicine show wagon, driven by a strange old man called Doc Mirablis, who claims to have once been a friend and colleague of a certain Viktor Von Frankenstein.