THE LION'S SKIN

Nicaragua in 1855 finds John Sanderson coming from the jungle with 15 pounds of gold flake and ready, at 22, to return to San Francisco. But his fortune is stolen, he becomes one of Col. William Walker's filibusters, and he falls in love with Tarra Manning, a vexing young widow with a two year old son. In the fight of the Liberales against the Serviles, Walker works for the purpose of bringing Nicaragua into the Union; his Americans are actually fighting just as hard for the Transit Company and Vanderbilt and Harrison -- and Morgan, and as they stop the whole army of the South, they create the miracle of the ""Immortals"". But their hero, once a physician, a newspaper publisher and a lawyer, and now a man in a hurry, lacks for lead for bullets; the new recruits are not as numerous as promised; his men know defeat and sickness; Tarra's father renounces his allegiance to the provisonal government and Tarra renounces John; and the awakening comes as they realize that Walker is for the secessionists conspiracy and heading for a slave empire in Nicaragua.... A bit of lesser known history, this has been accorded Teilhet's closest scrutiny and mirrors the shifting trends of the period, the emergence of what might have been a great man, and the years of turmoil on the Isthmus. Sturdy indeed.