“Are we going to stay here forever? I mean it’s really cold. I’ve been cold before but not like this.” A small girl and boy stood ten yards to his rear with the horse and mule, all hidden below the level of the ridge. “It just seems that since you haven’t seen anything, we could go down there and get warm. There might be a stove …”

“Please be quiet, Lottie.” Francis turned and held his hand out. “Now. We’re going to wait. I heard something somewhere down there that sounded like a scream. We’re going to wait and watch. Be quiet.”

There was a horse in front of the hut, tied to a half-broken hitch rail. Some chickens walked around the sides pecking at the dirt. There was no dog. Three goats were tied to stakes in back of the house. The horse had a familiar saddle on its back—military cut with the bedroll in front. The horse didn’t look wet, so it hadn’t worked hard getting here. Then, too, Lottie was right—it was cold, so the horse wouldn’t show much sweat.

All this went into Francis’s eyes and registered in his thoughts automatically—along with the direction of the wind, the fact that a coyote was off to the side a couple of hundred yards away eyeing the chickens, and a hawk was circling over the yard doing the same thing. All of it in and filed away.

There. A scream—short but high. Not a man. Maybe a child or a woman.

Well. That was all Francis thought: Well. If it was somebody needing help, he was in a bad place to give it. One fifteen-year-old boy, a young girl and a boy with him, a horse and a mule and one rifle.

Still. He couldn’t stay and not help.

It’s what he got for not going west, he thought—for not taking the two children and just heading out along the Oregon Trail to find his parents and the wagon train he had been kidnapped from almost two years ago. He and the children had made a good start west, then had gotten sidetracked as they crossed the prairie, and before he knew it an early fall had caught them short of the mountains. Snow had filled all the passes.

Somebody at a trading post on the trail had said that there was a southern route down in Mexico that stayed open all year, so Francis had started south. They couldn’t hope to winter in the northern prairies. He hadn’t realized that taking on Lottie and her little brother, Billy, would slow him down so. He had found them, alone on the prairie, after their father had died of cholera.