It is high summer in 1872 when Fred and Kate’s young neighbor girl is brutally murdered and their farm community’s very livelihood is under the threat of survival. The bones of this story are true. It was inherited from the author’s father. Fred and Kate were his grandparents., Old Phil reflects on the happenings from his room in The Golden Meadows Home nearly sixty years later:

The whole world’s been operatin’ fer too long on ‘bite and be bitten in return.’–Duck Legs Phil.