The bushwhackers beat and whip three Federals to death, mocking one of the dying men with his wife's love-letters (a vividly brutal sequence) a fourth Federal, spared thanks to Jake's mercy, repays the kindness by murdering Jake's father back home. Jake's basic decency, sorely tested by the escalating ugliness, comes into conflict with his cause. (No women or children, however.) He finds intense joy in the camaraderie with Jack Bull and most of the other young bushwhackers-and hardly minds much when he loses a finger in a shootout with the Yankee militia. Jake Roedel, son of Dutch immigrants, eagerly joins the roving ""First Kansas Irregulars,"" together with childhood-chum Jack Bull Chiles-after Jack Bull's landowner-father is killed by an invading gang of ""Federals."" Jake believes in the justice of robbing and killing any Yankee sympathizers. Grim, grisly exploits with a Civil War band of pro-South ""bushwhackers"" in Missouri and Kansas-as recalled, in terse, lyrical, somewhat mannered prose, by a tough/sensitive teen-age marauder.
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