Davey Bond is a 14 -year-old boy from Sacramento, California who is on the run in the summer of 1862 from a brutal guardian. On the Reno road he falls in with a scruffy young man in his 20s named Sam Clemens. Sam is a former Mississippi river boat pilot and printer. He's also a failed gold miner who found himself "allergic to long-handled shovels." Together they head for the raucous silver mining town of Virginia City, Nevada where Sam has been offered a reporting job on the Territorial Enterprise. On their way to Nevada Sam uses his gift of story-telling to save a pair of traveling con artists, "Professor" Otis Caprell and his 16-year-old grand daughter Jessie, from an ad hoc trial being held by the famous "Hanging Judge," David Loring. Sam's interference earns the enmity of Judge Loring, who turns up in Virginia City with an eye to making Sam one of his victims.