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He fights in the war under one human being who comes close to the Abijah of Tom's fantasy, Stonewall Jackson: "The "olonel from the western counties: who had drilled us the hardest... the one that seemed to have no laughter in him at all and whose eyes sometimes cursed us and sometimes grieved us and yet never blinked or broke their stony, steady regard of us each: like an oak-hewn Prophet seeking the weak among his sons." Novelist Grubb, author of a topnotch thriller, The Night of the Hunter (TIME, March 1, 1954), has now attempted what might have been a commonplace story of young love against a Civil War background. But he writes with such emotional conviction and lyric intensity that the book emerges as an authentic and haunting experience.