Leaving a troubled past behind him, Elmo Cotton (along with his good friend and neighbor, Mister Sherman Dixon) finally arrives at Old Port Fierce. It is there, in the infamous city he hopes to find the so-called 'Miracle-Maker' who had deserted him and his mother so many years ago, and kill him.
Inside an old brown suitcase, along with a pair of 'sailin' shoes' left to him by his dead uncle, lies the Motherstone, the strange black object Red-Beard had stolen from the dead man's grave and Elmo brought back down from the mountain the day he died. It is the key to not only a deep, dark and disturbing past, but also a bright new future that still lies an ocean away.
But before that can happen, Elmo, who is still very much a fugitive from Justice and 'Raccoon on the run', becomes involved in several incidences where fate and providence take over, leading him not only to his penultimate destiny, but to MIRACLE TEMPLE AND BARBECUE PIT OF AVENUE 'D' and the Miracle-Maker himself.
