Papa took off his hat and hung it on a nail near the door. He was tall and lean, and his knees and elbows jutted out when he sat on the room’s only chair. “Forgot to ask,” he said. “I had more important things on my mind. I’ll give you the bad news first. There are already two dry-goods stores, a tailor, and a shirtmaker here in town.”

She knew why it was bad news. No town this size needed three dry-goods stores. Or two shirtmakers.

Now Papa was almost-not-quite smiling. “Two dry-goods stores plus a furniture store? That tells me there are already plenty of women here.”

During the endless months of travel from Los Angeles to LaForge, Hanna and Papa had passed through town after town populated largely by menfolk. The farther west on the frontier, the fewer the women. In traveling east, Hanna and Papa had finally reached country where more women were living.

Hanna realized what Papa was saying. “There’s no dressmaker!” she exclaimed.

“I signed a one-month lease for a building on Second Street, and I bought the last vacant lot on Main. We’ll get a shop built and set up to sell dress goods.”

“And make dresses,” she said, her voice edged with defiance.

They had argued about this before. It had been fine when she was just a helper, at the shop in Los Angeles, but Papa thought that at fourteen, she was too young for the full responsibility of making dresses for grown women.

He went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “The drugstore’s on one side and a general store on the other. There’ll be plenty of traffic on that part of the street.”

“That sounds fine, Papa,” she said.

She would keep quiet for now, but she was already scheming to change his mind.

“You bought the lot?” she asked, trying to make her words sound like simple curiosity.

“You questioning my decision?” His voice rose in querulousness that she knew could easily become anger.

“No, Papa,” she said firmly, looking him in the eye. It was true: Papa had his faults, but he was a shrewd businessman. “I’m just wondering, why now? Why this place?” Since selling the shop in Los Angeles, they had always lived and worked in rented buildings.

He nodded; the glint of anger in his eyes faded slowly. “A couple of reasons. First, because of Harris.”

A man named Philip Harris was the reason that Hanna and Papa had come to Dakota. Papa had met him years earlier, in Kansas. At the end of last winter, when they decided to leave Cheyenne, Papa heard that Mr. Harris was justice of the peace in LaForge. “A good man,” Papa had said. “A fair man. Might as well go there as anywhere else.”