"J. Steven York's Clockwork Cowboy stories aren't just 'weird Westerns.' They're quite touching, too. Yes, Liberty Brass is a metal man with a busted 'governor.' But he's got as much heart as any other hero you'll find riding the range."
— Steve Hockensmith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Dawn of the Dreadfuls, and the Holmes on the Range mystery series

Throughout the west tales are told of a legendary Clockwork Cowboy, a restless mechanical wanderer who rode a clockwork horse, and whose bullets never missed. Some called him traitor, or monster, or murderer, but some called him hero. Some said he never stood by idle when the strong preyed upon the weak, and no bad men, mechanical or flesh, were safe while he wandered the plains.

But every story has a beginning...

Some say the Clockwork Cowboy was actually a Confederate Artilleryman called Liberty Brass. But for Liberty Brass, the trail seems ready to end almost before it begins. In a half-destroyed barn near the Gettysburg battlefield, on a dark, rainy night, two clockwork men, both damaged in war, meet. In the hours that follow, a terrible secret is revealed, a fateful judgment is made, and only one can survive to see the morning sun...