Homestead Sagas

The pliers clicked twice against the cold staple before the wind snatched the metallic ping away into the white-fringed cedar breaks. Imogen Sutherland braced her left boot against the base of a post, her stiffened wrist throbbing where an old mill-gate had crushed the bones three winters ago, and hauled upward on the nine-gauge strand until the barbed wire sang a thin, frozen note. The sleet was turning to rime, coating the limestone ledges of the upper Current River valley in a hard, gray glaze that made every step on the slope a hazard. Behind her, seven-year-old Clara huddled beneath a heavy canvas slicker inside the lee of the sheep wagon, blowing on her fingers and watching the treeline where Hargrove’s riders had been seen since noon. "Pull it taut, Imogen, or the sheep will have the whole span down before moonrise," Ned called out …

Can a ledger forged in dry ink withstand the freezing torrents of the high pass? The mountain doctor’s buggy brought a silent bride to a mill whose timber framework hid an altered survey, and only a woman who knew the alchemy of winter stores could keep them all alive when the spring thaw broke their isolation. --- The Arizona spring rain did not fall in gentle, domestic drops; it battered the cedar-shingled roof of the Sutherland mill with the flat, metallic sound of buckshot. Dorothea Sutherland pulled her heavy wool shawl tighter around her shoulders, her fingers brushing the damp tallow candles lined up on the rough-hewn pine table. Outside, the world had dissolved into an opaque curtain of slate-gray mist and roaring water. The canyon freight road, usually choked with alkaline dust and creaking mule trains, was now a churning brown wash racing down …

Who could have guessed that the terrifying mountain giant who purchased a bride for twenty dollars and two draft horses would turn out to be the only person in the valley willing to dismantle the weapon hidden beneath her wedding lace? Josephine pressed herself against the heavy timber wall of the storm-locked cabin, fighting a wave of dizziness as the December blizzard howled a violent death-march against the glass. Behind her, the mountain gale sealed the world shut, cutting off any escape from the freezing wilderness. Before her stood Harlan Creek, the enormous trapper whose reputation for savagery had terrorized the valley settlements for a decade. People whispered that he lived among wolves, spoke only in the dead of winter, and descended from the crags solely to trade pelts for flour and lead. They also called Josephine fat—a relentless, casual cruelty that had followed her …

The ice-cold blade pressed flat against the back of Caleb Whitmore’s neck, and the man who had conquered the Colorado Rockies could only stare in paralyzed silence at the ink drying on the fraudulent contract. Outside Ridge View Estate, the wind howled down the frozen canyons of the Rockies like a starving beast, burying the peaks beneath twenty feet of snow and cutting off the high valley from the rest of the world. High above the gossiping, mocking town of Oakhaven, the fortress of dark timber and gray stone stood like a mausoleum. Inside its grand, cavernous kitchen, the air smelled sharply of charred wood, woodsmoke, and the copper tang of an approaching disaster. Caleb Whitmore—towering, broad-shouldered, and heavily bearded—pacing the stone flags like a caged wolf, had spent a decade carving a silver empire out of unforgiving rock. He was the most feared recluse …