Father O'Shields knees creaked in painful complaint as he stooped over the man who lay crushed and bleeding on the rocks at the foot of the cliff. Flanagan threw his arms around the priest's neck, jerked him close, and pressed his lips close to the ear of his confessor. "Forgive me Father, for I 'ave sinned. I've sinned like hell." The tendrils of Flanagan's secret reach decades into the past and, unseen and unknown, affect the lives of the quartet of orphans it forced to flee from Ireland at the height of the famine, to America - a wild and lawless land they were forced to face with nothing but their wits and an empty gun.