 Ernest Pratt is the bourbon-swilling, cigar-smoking, womanizing author of the bestselling Nicodemus Legend dime novel series of the 1870s. As he writes them in the first person and poses for the cover art, his audience mistakenly believes that he really is the teetotalling gentleman adventurer he writes about. Then a disgraced Hungarian scientist named Janos Bartok, who was the real genius behind Thomas Edison, brings him to Sheridan, Colorado to actually bring truth to fiction by inventing the gadgets featured in the books.