War-seasoned young Barnabas Locke arrives at Harris's Ferry, where he does business with John Harris II, as a trader of goods going into the contested Ohio Country. Powerful interests want information about Indian alliances with the British, even as the Revolutionary War continues in the East and as white settlers illegally swarm across the boundary line of the Ohio River. With a bounty on his head but mindful of his mission and determined to rescue his Abenaki friend from the British at Detroit, he stumbles into the company of the infamous renegade Simon Girty, is forced to run a gauntlet of angry Wyandots, is ambushed by watermen, stages an ambush at an ancient mound, and comes face to face with his avowed enemy, the British Lieutenant Pendleton. Resourceful and dogged, Barnabas untangles himself from intrigue, arrest, and revenge and arrives at the Mississippi River where he parts from his blood-brother Squando for the winter.