The Union forces faced disaster on two sides. Confederate troops advanced determinedly from the South while, in the North, an amorphous army of deserters was being organized to strike at the back of the blue-uniformed soldiers with a blow that might prove as deadly as the bite of the small reptile whose name the Copperheads bore.

Discharged from the Union Army, Coleman Jons turned his knowledge of the Pennsylvania backwoods and backwoodsmen to fight the subversive threat to the Union's rear. At first he had to be content with following out Governor Curtin's order to "raise a little hell." Plagued on every hand by the hostile henchmen of the traitorous Senator Granly, to whose niece he owed his life, Jons answered the desperate call for men to stem the Confederate tide at Gettysburg. This victory, which merely intensified Copperhead activity, was to send him racing back to track down the Copperhead leaders in a series of daring escapades before they could loose, in the Union's midst, the destructive forces that lay behind the prisoner-of-war barricades at Elmira, New York-a mission which was to bring him finally into the arms of the girl who, despite her name, had won his heart.

Mr. Stover has plunged his hero into one of the most vital phases of the Civil War, providing all the elements of a thrilling historical novel, from romance to violence. With renewed vigor, he writes about the territory of which he had become the ex officio historian through his Revolutionary novels, Song of the Susquehanna, Men in Buckskin, and Powder Mission.