Langdon Towne is a young Congregationalist resident of Kittery, Maine, in love with Elizabeth Browne, the youngest daughter of Anglican minister Rev.

He is admitted to Harvard College, but an ill-timed visit from his friends Saved from Captivity ('Cap') Huff and Hunking ('Hunk') Marriner results in his expulsion in 1759, although it does allow him to meet the young artist John Singleton Copley.

Upon his return to Portsmouth, he incautiously insults Benning Wentworth, the governor of the Province of New Hampshire, and he and Hunk flee arrest and head to Crown Point to join the volunteers fighting the French and Indian War.

The Mohawks, who are closely allied with Sir William Johnson, are jealous of Rogers' preference for the Stockbridge Indians and decide to leave.

The rest of the Rangers are then informed that their destination is the Abenaki town of Saint Francis, a center for hostile native raiding parties into New England.

However, to prevent capture, the Rangers choose to return across Quebec and northern Vermont, through the forests along the eastern shore of Lake Memphremagog.

The harrowing journey creates dissension, and some Rangers who choose to separate from the main body are massacred by pursuing French and Indian troops.

The starving troops eventually make it safely to the planned meeting point, Fort Wentworth on the Connecticut River, where reinforcements and supplies were supposed to be waiting for them.

A group of four men, including Rogers and Towne, make the arduous raft trip down the Connecticut to the Fort at Number 4 to get food for the rest of the company.

His search for sponsorship leads him to Benjamin Franklin, who arranges for him to get a commission to limb a panel painting of Jeffery Amherst at Vauxhall Gardens.

Towne finds that Ann, now about 14, was left nine years ago with a family that trained children to act as crippled beggars, and he ends up paying £15 to take her away from there.

With the help of Charles Townshend, Rogers is appointed governor of Michilimackinac over the objections of General Thomas Gage and Sir William Johnson, who had monopolized trade with the natives.

Rogers has arranged for several of his former Rangers to join the journey, including McNott (who lost a leg from the gunpowder explosion), Jonathan Carver, and James Tute; Elizabeth, Potter and Ann also accompany the group to Michilimackinac.

Roberts, however, believed that the transcripts had probably been destroyed by Rogers' enemies, Gage and Johnson, and that copies still might exist at the Colonial Office in England.

[1] After an extended search, when the novel was almost complete, copies of both transcripts were located, and Roberts' theory that they would be helpful, not harmful, to Rogers' reputation proved to be correct.

However, Roberts fell behind in writing the book as a result of the inability to find the transcripts, and he had to finish the last part of the story (beginning with the journey from Michilimackinac) while on holiday in Italy, without the help of Tarkington.

Another friend of Roberts, novelist A. Hamilton Gibbs (author of the number one bestseller of 1925, Soundings), performed an editing function similar to Tarkington for the last section.