“You mean Pa never gave you credit for it. I always knew who ran things.”
“And Ma did the job before me. She’s the one who taught me what it took to run a newspaper while Pa was busy being a showman. He talked in the diner and on the boardwalk and in the taverns while he smoked cigars and played cards. He ate at the restaurants while we scrambled for enough to feed ourselves at home. He led parades and visited with the mayor and spoke up at community events.” Deb darted after Ronnie again when he got too far away and carried him back.
“While you took notes and wrote the stories later.” Gwen took Ronnie from Deb and stood him on his little feet. The boy squealed in pleasure and immediately headed for the horse. Sighing, Gwen directed him elsewhere as the little tyke protested.
“It wasn’t just Pa who never gave me credit. Not one man in that whole town ever did. Including the ones who knew I was interviewing them for a story or making purchases and paying bills for the paper and convincing them to buy ads for it. They saw me as an errand girl for our great and wise father.”
“Who spent every cent we couldn’t hide from him on poker.” Gwen shook her head in disgust. There was no sense saying more; it was a simple fact. They’d worked their hearts out for a man who did nothing and took everything.
When he died, the paper had closed because no one did business with or bought ads or subscriptions from a paper whose editor was no longer there, even though nothing had changed.
Deb had tried to keep it all going for a few months, but finally she faced reality and sold the printing press, moved out of their rented house, and headed west, determined to find a place they could work for themselves for the first time in their lives.
They had dreams of making it in California, and they still would someday. Deb’s jaw firmed as she vowed to herself and to God that she’d find a way to head west. She’d carve out a life for herself and Gwen.
She’d do it. She was capable. She’d fight for justice for folks like Ronnie’s parents. And she’d run a newspaper again—she had years of experience as proof she could do it.
She was out here in a land where anyone could succeed if they were bold enough, if they were smart and strong enough. And she was all of those things.
Before she’d done it for Pa. Now she’d do it for herself. And somehow watching Trace, and knowing he thought first of justice, made something grow inside her. It gave her the strength to do anything she put her mind to. She trusted herself enough to believe.
CHAPTER
5
He didn’t trust himself.
He was too filled with fury, too hungry for revenge.
Finding these men and punishing them threatened to take him over and send him galloping down the trail—the fork that led him away from home—with murder in his heart.
The men who did that to the wagon train were filthy, brutal murderers. They needed to die. Just as the men who’d done the same to his father’s wagon train needed to die.
Worse yet, from what he’d seen in that wagon circle, he knew these were the same men. The knife wounds, the scattered arrows made to look like the Paiutes had attacked. But the arrows weren’t right. And the little things they’d done wrong were the exact things the men who’d killed his father had done.
He could catch them. They had a few hours’ start, but driving a herd was slow and his horse would close the distance fast. Knowing they were within his reach added to Trace’s desire for revenge.
They needed to die for the multiple murders they’d committed today.
But of course he couldn’t go after them.
God had given over to him the care of four helpless people, and he had to get them home.
His throat felt thick with the two tearing needs—to chase these men and to protect this brood.
Seeing those women come running out of the grass, well, nothing had ever hit him that hard. Not since he’d been left completely alone, a fifteen-year-old who’d considered himself a full-grown man, until he had to be. The aloneness on this high mountain trail had threatened to break him.
There was never any question that he’d help four stranded travelers. Any decent man would help, and there were plenty of men who’d be described as less than decent who’d’ve helped them, too. Not the marauders who’d killed men and women in that wagon train, but most men in the West treated women with almost reverent respect. There were just too few women. They were rare and precious and to be protected above all.
But beyond that simple right and wrong—beyond what any man would do—came a blow to Trace’s gut at seeing that these folks had survived the same thing he had.
And God had allowed him to come along and help them. Trace considered that a great honor. Which didn’t mean that watching a baby get its diaper changed wasn’t enough to set off a deep panic in his gut. What if he was asked to help?
That alone gave him a powerful incentive to keep the women happy and healthy. But caring for all of them ran directly at odds with what he wanted to do, which was ignore the trail that led home and keep after those vicious outlaws.
Trace hadn’t been able to do anything when his wagon train was attacked. Survival took every ounce of his strength, and even then the winter in the High Sierra had almost killed him.
Things were
