In 1879 a thirteen-year-old boy, his friend, and his dog journey four hundred miles across Texas to bring back the body of an older brother for burial in the family graveyard.
Resentful at being sent to California with his sister to avoid the dangers of the Civil War in Delaware, thirteen-year-old Will is soon entangled with Rebel plotters and Union spies in San Francisco.
In the early years of the Civil War, teenage Kansan farm boy Lije Tulley becomes a Jayhawker, an abolitionist raider freeing slaves from the neighboring state of Missouri, and then goes undercover there as a spy.
During the summer of 1916 thirteen-year-old Fayette and her brother accompany their widowed mother on a mule trip into the California mountains, where she is to establish library outposts in isolated communities.
While spending the summer with his grandmother in Colorado, thirteen-year-old Paul becomes involved in a dangerous adventure when he tries to trace the history of an unusual gold and ruby belt buckle that his grandmother claims is a family heirloom.
To help her poverty-stricken family, 13-year-old Lupita enters California as an illegal alien and starts to work while constantly on the watch for "la migra.".
