marlene banks

     Resolving for different reasons to abandon their past lifestyles, four fast guns with well-earned reputations settle quietly outside the all-Negro town of Nicodemus, Kansas. The men are commissioned to protect the town from an unscrupulous land baron’s attempted takeover with payment of cash and land. They face challenges of unwelcoming townsfolk, a devious adversary, and powerful corporate greed padded by the government, along with their personal struggles concerning life, faith and budding romances.

     Gideon McCoy, Caleb Cain, Joshua Boudreaux and David ‘Boone’ Tennyson are immediately attracted to the charming Nicodemus women: Sugar, a beautiful farm girl, Louise the talkative daughter of a general store owner, Liberty a sassy saloon owner and the newly arrived schoolmarm, Polly. 

     While Nicodemus residents enthusiastically anticipate the advent of the Pacific Union Railroad, a scheming Lucas Hitchcock, along with the widespread cultural of greed and ingrained racism work against a potentially beneficial arrangement. Yet the Godly presence in Lucas’ most despised enemy, Geoffrey Abington, foils his vicious bid for control. Nicodemus becomes pawn in a tug of war between a railroad company only concerned with expansion and profit, Lucas' power play against the godly team of Geoffrey Abington and his friend, Harlan Colby. Harlan is a loving family man and longtime railroad executive fed up with his company’s trend of unethical business practices. He takes a bold stand for what he believes to be God’s standard in business, society and humanity as a whole. People, black white and red are being harassed, run from their land and even killed. The four gunmen are hired to protect the Nicodemus’ citizens but encounter obstacles both spiritual and natural they did not foresee. Sides are drawn culminating into a deadly showdown from which God alone would have to rescue Nicodemus.

     Nicodemus, Kansas was an actual post-reconstruction African American town that still exists today. This story is fiction with historic nuggets of fact all through it.