Guns of the Yellow Rose is the sequel to Ever Blooms the Rose . Set in Cartersville in the 1870s, The protagonist Virgil Clay-Harris is a Confederate sharpshooter survivor of the Civil War. His woman is Deekie, a spirited young woman always looking for her next adventure. Clay pines for his runaway Diddy who abandoned the family just before the Civil War. He is rumored to be in Texas, held by a gang as a gunsmith, illegally converting old percussion revolvers over to take metal bullets. Clay wishes only to go there and free him from his forced servitude.

Clay and Deekie are driven by the economic collapse, the Panic of 1873, to seek traveling work. Clay hires on as an armed protector for a gambler making his way by wagon to first to Nashville and then on to Memphis. There the gambler intends to board a riverboat. While in that Mississippi River port town, a sequence of bad luck awaits them all. Clay and Deekie then take advantage of the Butterfield Overland Stage Coach to make a break for Fort Worth, Texas, to find Clay’s Diddy .

Along the way, they become acquainted with a vigilante trail rider and an undercover Pinkerton Agent, both of whom we come to learn have interests of their own in finding Clay’s Diddy. All parties converge on Fort Worth in the raucous Hell’s Have Acre district. The novel comes to an adventurous encounter with the Stone Canyon Gang, providing the climax to this adventure.