Exempt From Fear

Following the Civil War, completion of the transcontinental railroad linked the industrial East with the developing West. Our reunited nation was booming; a railroad had stitched it together. Other, smaller, but no less significant railroading enterprises sprung up, pushing track across Kansas and Nebraska and men flooded west by the thousands. When men crossed the Mississippi River and left the settlements behind, the world burst wide open, the horizons spread out, and they were no longer overcrowded. The vast, boundless plains, and farther west the awesome mountain barriers, attracted men looking for a place to start, or to start over. These were men of all kinds; among them were boys in blue who had dreamed around wartime campfires of homesteading on the prairies, and boys in gray escaping the South’s postwar anarchy to start anew. The West was wild—just the place for a generation of restless young men who had survived the most bitter war in the country’s history. It was a place where a man might lose himself, and some did. When a man, or a woman, went west, they went with a clean slate. The West became many things; most of all, it became a melting pot. Adventurers came seeking gold, new lands, and excitement. Gamblers, women of the oldest profession, thugs, gunmen, rustlers, horse thieves, miners, cowhands, freighters and drifters, all crowded the wagon-rutted streets of any western town at the any given time. Rogues by the hundreds went west seeking easy money. In the seemingly boundless, unrestrained prairie of western Kansas, Exempt From Fear continues Nick Wright’s fictional saga of his great-grandfather, Timothy Barnes, as he leads a group from his former command in confrontations not only with enemies from the past, but with newly discovered foes as well. When cryptic messages appear after attempts on the lives of numerous friends and former Greyhounds, as the Rangers were often referred to because of their lightning quick raids, a handful of dedicated men led by Barnes gather to discover that the only failure to mar their war-time record had returned to haunt them. Once again, they join forces to protect their friends, only to find themselves fighting for their own lives as well as the lives of loved ones against outlandish odds. Villains seeking easy money, and others seeking revenge were a danger to the Greyhounds and the fascinating group of women to whom they were attracted. The Greyhounds survived four years of loss and deprivation, often going hungry while fighting the elements as well as the enemy. They succeeded because they believed in themselves and in their fellow Rangers. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder throughout the War and survived. They believed in standing tall in the face of trouble, in being their own man, and to never let down a friend. These men were not trouble hunters, but when faced with it, they knew what to do.