In a rural Australian coal mining town shortly after World War II, teenaged Eddie makes a startling discovery when he investigates the murder of a local high school girl.
Relying on his horse as his protector, fourteen-year-old Robey Childs travels out into the battlefields of the Civil War on a mission to find his father and is forever changed by the destruction he sees.
Retells the myth of Chiron, wisest of the centaurs who gives up immortality for Prometheus, in a modern setting where Chiron is a high-school science teacher, George Caldwell, and Prometheus is his fifteen-year-old son, Peter.
Because he had been unable to fight off the gator which injured his father, fourteen-year-old Thrasher joins the Confederate Army hoping to prove his manhood.