Tired and spent, Lieutenant Schell Campbell and army scout Walking Owl returned home from the Civil War in 1866 and thought they were done with fighting. But when they met in Independence, Missouri, they were greeted by hostile neighbors and destructive bushwhackers in the Missouri-Kansas border country. As if that wasn"t enough, a posse mistakes them for Jesse and Frank James. They manage to make friends with Schell"s neighbors, the McFalls, who during the war years had hidden from the invading Union and Confederate armies and eluded outlaws in their shack on the swampy river land. Now, Schell is on a mission to find out what happened to his family and the Osage is searching for his father"s bequest in the ancestral Blue Mounds. But the borderland will make their tasks and their homecoming a journey of danger and death.