When Rob and Sari Lou - Buzzard - Custis parted the tall grass, that misty July dawn in 1864, they looked down into a gully full of Yankee soldiers.

"You're right, Rob!" Buzzard gasped. "Those Bluebellies are digging a tunnel so old Grant can blow up General Lee's entrenchments there on the ridge and capture Petersburg!"

"We've got to get through the Yankee patrol somehow, and warn General Lee," Rob declared. What happened then was the first of many exciting adventures that Rob and Buzzard shared, as the dreadful Civil War rolled ever closer. When the fall of Richmond became only a matter of hours, Rob and Buzzard were there, as the panicked citizens fired their own city rather than surrender it intact to the Union Army. It was here that Rob came face to face with President Abraham Lincoln and found that he could not hate this man as he had been taught to do.

Rob remembered that encounter later, when he and Buzzard stood wide-eyed at Appomattox Court House, in the solemn moment when the victorious General Grant met General Lee. Sad, weary, but proud and courtly still, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Southern Army and so ended the long and bloody struggle to preserve the union.

From the dust jacket