When a deputy is murdered in cold blood, twenty-one-year-old Billy Free is accused of the crime. A sheriff and his posse attempt to force their way into his mother's cabin and Free shoots them dead, immediately becoming the object of an extensive manhunt. Although he manages to elude a Greene Country posse and make his way back to Texas, a county sheriff named Bill Fink is waiting to teach him that crooked lawmen are by no means unique to Mississippi. Suddenly Free is in more trouble than ever, fleeing across the Texas frontier to a place where all but the beautiful and loyal Bess Noble believe him to be guilty of murder... in The Guns of Billy Free by Doug Bowman.