Return of the Mucker

Billy Byrne was no stranger to the mean streets, but murder wasn't in his blood. When a frame-up lands him in chains, the law sees a mucker and decides his fate before the trial begins. So Byrne does what any man with nothing left to lose would do: he breaks out, hits the rails, and becomes the thing they accused him of being anyway. Hoboing across a Depression-era America that has no place for a man with his kind of strength, Byrne finds an unlikely companion in Bridge, a wandering poet with a philosopher's soul and a gunman's instincts. Together they flee a detective who won't stop hunting them, crossing into Mexico at the height of its bloody revolution. There, Byrne must choose a side in a war between generals, fighting not for ideology but for survival, for friendship, for the simple right to exist without a chain on his ankle. Bank robberies, Indian attacks, and treachery from within his own ranks await. This is pulp adventure at its rawest: a story about a man the system discarded, finding meaning only when he stops running from it.