The kid is a pale, thin 14-year-old boy who runs away from his home in Tennessee. His mother is dead, and he leaves behind a younger sister and his alcoholic father. He is illiterate and already has “a taste for mindless violence” (8). He wanders to Memphis and, a year later, arrives in Saint Louis. He rides a boat to New Orleans, where he works in a lumber yard and fights sailors outside taverns. One night, he is shot twice by a Maltese boatswain and is nursed back to health by the wife of a tavern owner. He slips away as soon as he can because he cannot pay her anything, and he heads for Galveston, Texas.

During his travels, the kid loses his childhood memories and his innocence. He wanders the countryside looking for work. Passing one crossroads, he sees a hanged man. The kid continues to work and wander until, in 1849, he arrives in Nacogdoches. In the small town, he sees a priest named Reverend Green deliver a sermon in a “ratty” rain-soaked tent (9). The kid is the only unarmed person in the reader, listening to Green describe sin and the perils of hell.