Already 9 yrs old, Nick, Penny's younger brother, knew he did not want to be adopted by Mrs.  Wertz.  On Penny's 12th birthday, Nick announced "I'm going to run away."  At their ages, they weren't cute babies, running away was the only way out of the orphanage...After walking all night, all the way to the sea, Penny and Nick collapsed and hid under the sails of a boat in the harbor.  The next morning they found their sleepy faces at the wrong end of a dripping wet mop, standard punishment for stowaways, insisted one of the owners of the sailboat.  The boat owner, Ben, was just 15 yrs old, a boy whose father the U.S. Navy insisted was MIA in the Pacific during World War II.  The only way Ben could think of to prevent his uncle from selling his father's boat to a willing and waiting purchaser, and fulfill the boy's mission to make good on a promise he made to his father, was to sail her out to sea.

That is the beginning of the tale of "The Lion's Paw."  The three children are chased on a thrilling adventure steering the sailboat Ben's father made, hundreds of miles through the inland waterways of Florida - on the St. Lucie Canal, from the Atlantic Coast all the way to the Island of Captiva in the Gulf of Mexico - keeping one step ahead of the Coast Guard, bounty hunters, alligators and tropical storms that threaten to deprive them of their quest for freedom.