1844 Maryland. Aristocrat Blake Cantrell, who has never worked a day in his life, is forced to sell all his assets, including his manor in Baltimore County and slaves (even if he was tempted to set them free in they being more like family to him), to pay off debts accrued from his carefree aristocrat's lifestyle and a downturn in the economy, and ending up with next to nothing in needing to start life anew. For personal reasons and despite having no real ambition to work, he decides to head to the frontier town of Cumberland where he has the prospect of a job, working for the Baltimore and Ohio, the steam railway which is a burgeoning business albeit one which is still having reliability problems, making it difficult to compete with the old-fashioned stagecoach. Having no work experience, he instead enters reluctantly into the employee of B and O's competitor, the Bullet Stagecoach Line as a manual laborer under the supervision of its gruff manager, Captain Boss Starkey, but the two men don't much like each other. B and O has tried so far unsuccessfully to obtain Bullet's assigned right-of-way to be able to lay their next set of tracks. In this work, Cantrell stumbles onto the fact that elements within Bullet are using the coaches as a means of slave-running. What Cantrell decides to do with this information may place him at further odds with Starkey, but also with Bullet's co-owner, Boston socialite Susan Griffith, the reason he came to Cumberland in the first place as he is in love with her.
