The year 1777 rightly earned its name, "the bloody sevens," because of fierce Indian massacres. Eleven-year-old Kelsey Bond, traveling westward to Kentucky on the Wilderness Trail to join his father at Logan's Fort, escaped death at the hands of marauding Indians only because the two men he was traveling with had ordered him to wait while they detoured to hunt an old silver mine. Kel heard the shots and war whoops, but though he tried hard, he could not make his legs take him fast enough to the scene of the attack. In the days and nights of extreme danger that followed, when Kel abandoned the trail and made his way west alone through the woods, he was haunted by the thought that he was a coward, that he had failed to help his companions. The joy of Kel's reunion with his father was dimmed by his sense of guilt, and only through his father's wisdom and Kel's own instinctive heroism during a siege at Logan's Fort did he finally learn the true meaning of courage.

An outstanding writer, known and loved for such books as The Far Frontier, The Lone Hunt, and Flaming Arrows, once again gives dimension and reality to the early settlers and the troubled times in which they lived.

From the dust jacket