In the closing months of the war the bankrupt Confederate government is forced to exchange bonds for bales of cotton, which they desperately need to raise foreign credit. The cotton is marked and left on the plantations until it can be collected. After the surrender, Washington decides that all this cotton belongs to the United States.

Two young officers, veterans of the war, Ambrose Bierce and Augustus Durrell, are among the hundreds of Treasury agents recruited to locate this contraband cotton, worth a dollar a pound on the world market, and deliver it to the federal authorities. But this is easier said than done. The first problem is staying alive in a hostile country full of bushwhackers and nightriders. The second is actually finding the cotton, hidden beep in the bayous, or on remote plantations. The southerners would rather burn it than see it fall into enemy hands.

Bierce and Durrell, although friends, are very different men. Bierce is a tough , scrupulously honest Indiana farm boy. Durrell, the scion of a prominent New York family, is a charming opportunist out to grab what he can. Bierce is appalled by conditions in the south. The misery and hardship imposed on the civillian population outrages his ideas of how a vanquished enemy should be treated. Durrell, on the other hand, takes it for granted that honesty and justice have no part to play in public service. Durrell doesn't consider himself to be a mere government employee, but a partner - the senior partner.

The friendship begins to fracture when Bierce investigates the disappearance of another Treasury agent who mysteriously vanishes with eight hundred thousand dollars worth of contaband cotton. Bierce's investigation takes him into the dark heart of the Reconstruction and tests the limits of loyalty, duty and frienship.
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