Plot
In 1840, U.S. Army General Zachary Taylor sends out Lieutenant Tufts and scout Monk to a remote Florida island home where the reclusive Captain Quincy Watts lives with a 5-year-old son.
The soldiers' mission is to rescue men and women taken prisoner by Seminole warriors. One of them, Judy Beckett, develops a romantic attraction to Capt. Watts as they flee the Indians into the Everglades.
Most of the other Army troops are massacred after Watts and Tufts separate from them to construct canoes. Back at his home, Watts is distraught to find that his son is gone. He has an underwater fight to the death with Seminole chief Ocala, then is relieved to learn that his boy is safe.
Read more about this topic: Distant Drums
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)