About:
All the secret joys, the sudden terrors of being young and free and far from home After years of abuse from his foster parents, 12-year-old George Mellish runs away. Wandering the post--Civil War landscape of Tennessee, George is first taken in by Dirty Jim Jelliman, a hard-drinking old man who tells him the legend of the "Fool Killer," murderer of the foolish. When George meets disturbed ex-soldier Milo Bogardus, he begins to suspect the nervous young man might be the killer in real life.