Leonard Wibberley opens this story as follows:

"It was the fall of the year 1780 and that war which had started higgledy-piggledy five years earlier with an untidy crackle of musketry at the villages of Concord and Lexington, and which had swept the North American continent from as far north as Quebec to as far south as Savannah, Georgia, had ground to a stalemate. Neither side had won. Neither side had lost. Neither side seemed capable of any plan or action which would bring about a decision."

Peter Treegate, who first saw action against the British at Bunker Hill, is now in the South, where he is convinced the war will reach a climax. Peter, whose training is of the frontier, gathers together a band of Carolina mountaineers who know how to shoot and how to skirmish against Ferguson and Tarleton of the Crown's forces. Treegate's raiders see action at King's Mountain and Cowpens, two of the smallest but most significant battles of the Revolution, and Peter is present at Yorktown, where the end of the long struggle is signified by "one lone drummer boy beating his drum, and one lone British officer standing beside him with a white handkerchief in his hand."

From the book