“Okay, I might have let it slip that his ranch was sitting on Lone Wolf’s land.”

“You might have?”

“I did, all right?” she said belligerently. “I don’t know what difference it makes. He was going to find out sooner or later anyway.”

Janet clung to her temper by a thread. “But it might have been nice if he found out about it from me. Now he must think I’ve just been playing some sort of sick game by hanging around out there. He probably thinks we’re out to betray him.”

“Aren’t we?” Jenny asked simply. “Isn’t that why we’re in this godawful state, instead of back home in New York, where we belong?”

With that she whirled and ran from the kitchen, leaving Janet to take the burned hamburgers from the stove. No longer the least bit interested in food, she dumped the frying pan, burgers and all, into the sink, then went out to the front porch to sit in a rocker and think.

Should she go out to White Pines first thing in the morning and tell Harlan everything? But, if he already knew most of it, why had he been trying to back her into a corner about their future earlier today? Why hadn’t he been blasting her as the deceitful traitor she felt like? Would she ever understand the workings of this man’s mind? Or any man’s, for that matter?

And why, dear heaven, did it suddenly seem to matter so much to her that Harlan Adams not think ill of her? Was it possible that he had come to mean more to her than that elusive dream she’d formulated as a child and held on to so tightly ever since?

She could still recall Lone Wolf telling her about the Comanches known as Penateka or Honey-Eaters, who’d occupied a stretch of the Comancheria from Edwards Plateau to Cross Timbers. His telling had been further preservation of the oral history of his forefathers.

Even now she shook with indignation at his description of the 1840 meeting in San Antonio during which the Comanche leaders who’d come to discuss peace had been slaughtered in what had come to be known as the Council House Massacre. There had been nothing after that to indicate to the tribe that Texans could ever be trusted.

Slowly but surely settlers had been given more and more of the Comanche lands, until Lone Wolf’s ancestors had been forced from Texas altogether. Could she ever achieve retribution for something that had occurred so long ago and even now seemed so complex? Everything she’d read indicated it would be difficult, if not impossible, to make any legal claim.

The questions kept her up most of the night. The answers didn’t come at all.