Randolf and Elizabeth Hudson were barely into their teens when they left the persecuted city of Nauvoo with their mother, Mary, and relocated to booming St. Louis. Mary had lost faith in the restored gospel after the deaths of her dear husband and the Prophet Joseph Smith. For the rest of her life, bitterness prevented Mary from ever again speaking of the Church. But now, thirteen years later, civil war looms on the horizon. And as Rand stands by his mother's freshly dug grave, he ponders what the faith he knew as a child might mean for himself and his sister in an increasingly troubled world. Both independent thinkers, their opposition to slavery places them at odds with friends and family alike, and mounting political tension threatens to tear apart their most cherished relationships. As Rand fights to keep the family's steamship business from a hypocritical uncle who has sold out to treacherous slaveholders and secessionists, Elizabeth struggles to end an ill-suited entanglement that could cripple her freedom. Now both must stand with courage as bonds are tested and old wounds re-opened in the midst one of the darkest periods in history, a time when a great nation divides against itself. Robert Marcum is a retired member of the BYU Idaho religion faculty and is presently serving as a stake president in the Rexburg Idaho Henry's Fork Stake. He is married to Janene Andreasen, formerly of Grace, Idaho, and they have eight children and twenty grandchildren. He graduated from BYU in 1972 and received a master's degree from Idaho State in 1982. He taught for seminaries and institutes for seventeen years before receiving a position at Ricks College/BYU Idaho, where he taught for another seventeen years. There, he served as chairman of the Religion Department for five years. During that time, he led student and adult tours to Israel, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Italy, France, and England, and he, his wife, and four children lived in the Ukraine while he taught a semester of religious studies at a university in Donetsk. He has written ten additional novels for the LDS market in action, adventure, and historical fiction