The Pass-Key

What happened in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 1862? A twenty-first century eleven year-old boy is given the chance to find out when he visits a kindly woman who asks him to choose a skeleton key for his own. The key he chooses sends him all over the house and outbuildings to find the door it opens. When he does so, he discovers he is back in the year 1862 where he finds a slave boy of his own age hiding in a shed on the property. After an adventure in town amid the disruption of war where soldiers are seen and fires are smoking and both sides - Union and Confederate - are awaiting a conflict, the boys get into trouble of a kind very different from that which a twenty-first century boy might find. How this forges a friendship and whether the slave boy resolves his problems and his friend returns to the present is the suspense of this story.