Found near death by a young man and his father, the stranger from the shallow grave is nursed back to health by the man's wife. Known only as Lazarus, after the close friend that Jesus Christ raised from the dead, he helps save the life of visiting President Ulysses S. Grant from an assassination attempt by a gang of rebels.

In his search for his past in the faces of people he meets, Lazarus comes across a man whom he thinks he knows from the murky shadows of a command he may have had in the Confederate army.