A revisionist take on the Western novel set in the early nineteenth-century Georgia gold rush features a fifteen-year-old mute boy and his friend on the run after commiting a major crime.

In 1851, thirteen-year-old Cecilia has her eyes opened to the horrors of slavery when she accompanies her ornithologist uncle on an expedition in search of the rare "Scarlet Ibis," and watches as he shows slaves the way to the Underground Railroad.