The Young Frontiersman

It is 1777, early in the Revolutionary War, when fleet young Barnabas Locke runs against an hourglass to become a courier in Captain Whitcomb’s Rangers. In the defense of Fort Ticonderoga, he is dispatched as a solo spy to track the movements of troops and gunboats as British General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne masses his forces for the expected assault down Lake Champlain.

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.

In spring 1782, young Revolutionary War veteran Barnabas Locke and his Abenaki friend, the visionary Squando, reunite to cross the Mississippi and travel deep into the Great Plains. At the riverbank, they find their hired keelboat commandeered by the imperious young Spanish Isabella and her brother Ramon, who are fleeing the river pirate Joe Fontaine with a cache of jewels.

Young Revolutionary War veteran Barnabas Locke makes winter camp in an isolated canyon in the Colorado wilderness, finding pictographs and petroglyphs made by the Ancient Ones. His elderly Arapaho mentor appears like a dream at his fire, issuing a warning but leaving behind a very real huge black dog. Barnabas uses all his frontier skills and learns new ones to survive a mountain winter, but traps himself in a manmade pit, discovers a mysterious abandoned city, and outruns an unnaturally large and beautiful spotted cat.