Peter Loon

The American Revolution has ended. The District of Maine remains a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Deep in these north woods, a young man - a boy, really, who has never been away from his home in Sheepscott Great Pond - sets off at his mother's urging to search for a person he has never met. His travels quickly lead him into a series of startling entanglements and adventures and, providentially, into a friendship with a nomadic parson with a seafaring past whose humble intelligence and steady head prove useful when Peter Loon finds the world away from home to be more dangerous and complex than he had ever imagined.
For Peter is soon caught in the middle of a rebellion. The "Great Proprietors," many of whom are from Boston, have claimed vast tracts of this northern Maine district, based on dusty old King's grants and contradictory Indian deeds. Now hardscrabble homesteaders who pushed north to squat on the land in order to survive have staked their right to this same wilderness. Bands form. Violent incidents between land agents and the feral brotherhood of "Liberty Men" escalate. Crisscrossing their way between the two sides, Peter Loon and Parson Leach tread the razor-thin line between law and justice and encounter every kind of person and situation, from a bellicose meeting of "Liberty Men" at a wayside inn to a dangerous confrontation over the fate of a tormented girl, from a great sea captain's manor populated with maddeningly handsome young women with a taste for adventurers to a climactic dispute at the storied harbor of Wiscasset.