After a checkered career at sea and on land Leo Mack settles down in Blue Anchor shortly before the Civil War. A solitary man living in Ida Crabtree's boarding house, he earns his living as a tinker but finds his worth and mission when the war begins. As a traveling tinker he carries news of military events to isolated farmhouses and becomes in effect a broadcaster of war news. In time just about every person in the county knows Leo by name but nothing of his background. Isaac Brandimore takes it upon himself to tell Mack's story but dies before the work is finished. Emily Kingston comes forward to salvage the story and finish it, but not before Leo dies. Concluding the project, she observes that Leo Mack in tattered work clothes was "animated in good times and bad by blood and brain and spirit." His death, she tells us, diminished Blue Anchor.

A man vanishes from the rugged coastline of Cornwall and arrives on the shores of Gandy Springs, South Africa. Many years later, a mysterious figure arrives at 'The Admiral Benbow' in Chapel Street, Penzance. A man with a new identity. He opens children's attractions in popular Cornish towns. What are his motives? One day, he turns up at Wheal Thomas, the former site of an old tin mine and memories are rekindled. There he discovers the Scott Morgan Project. Life changes as three generations of the same family are reunited.