The year is 1878, peak of the Texas cattle trade. The place is Dodge City, Kansas, a saloon filled cow town jammed with liquored-up adolescent cowboys and young Irish hookers. Violence is random and routine, but when the burned body of a mixed-blood boy named Johnnie Sanders is discovered, his death shocks a part-time policeman named Wyatt Earp. And it is a matter of strangely personal importance to Doc Holiday, the frail twenty-six-year-old dentist who has just opened an office at No. 24, Dodge House.