The Scioto Circuit

Elias Cane comes home from the war in the spring of 1864 - sixteen years old, one arm in a sling, a shattered shoulder that will never fully heal, and a discharge certificate with a verse from Micah copied in the inside cover. He comes home to his family's farm in the hill country of southern Ohio, to a father who has not spoken about his oldest son's death in two years, and to a county that is slowly discovering what the war has cost it.

What he finds is that a war contractor named Cornelius Aldrich has been waiting for the cost to come due.

Aldrich supplied the Army with boots that were not leather, blankets that fell apart in rain, tin mess kits that contaminated food. The men who wore and carried these things are either dead or home with the consequences. The money is in Aldrich's account. And now he is spending it - buying up the farm notes held by the families of the men who didn't come back, calling them at fraudulent terms, and using a compliant county surveyor to move boundary lines on properties headed to foreclosure.

The county sheriff is Aldrich's man. There is no lawyer the families can afford.

Cane is seventeen, working his father's farm, with no standing and no authority. He has a composition book, access to the county recorder's register, and a specific understanding - learned in a Kentucky hospital ward the year before - that the obligation to act is not conditional on having the right rank.

He begins to build the account.

The Scioto Circuit is the second book in The Making of Elias Cane, a prequel series to The Circuit Rider Mysteries - following the young Elias Cane before the circuit, before the ordination, before thirty-four years of knowing what justice costs.