The year is 1875 and Fordham Fox is a young gambler setting out on his quest to win enough money to purchase a horse farm for himself and his accompanying best friend Bill Garrity. Fordham was raised on a similar type farm in Kentucky where his Osage Indian grandfather had taught him how to play cards. Gray Fox, Fordham's grandfather, had also bestowed a secret gift on Fordham that practically guaranteed him success in all games of chance. His grandfather had also warned Fordham that the gift had a dark side, which, unfortunately, the young gambler would soon experience. Aboard the Robert E. Lee, a gambling riverboat, Fordham becomes infatuated with a sixteen year-old beauty from Illinois, accompanied by her philandering mother and her aging precocious aunt. Tragedies occur aboard the Robert E. Lee that forever alters Fordham's dreams, severs his Kentucky family ties for years, and sets him on a relentless course of retaliation against the men who had wronged him. Fordham's prowess with a Colt Peacemaker, and a large Bowie knife with an inscription, "Krima Eleusis", are further gifts his Osage grandfather had bestowed upon him. These gifts come in extremely handy as Fordham encounters more notorious bad men in the practically lawless nineteenth century Arkansas Territory. He has to accept a new name, a new family, and he is forced to make a new best friend!