Morgan was meeting with an important client in his well-appointed law office in San Antonio when his clerk tapped on the door and entered without waiting for a reply. Morgan didn’t mind as he expected Jim Cooper had a good reason for the interruption.

United States Marshal War Adams stared at the telegram in disbelief. His father had been murdered? As difficult as it was to come to grips with the news, it would become more disturbing when he discovered that the person arrested for the crime was the nurse that his father had hired to ease his suffering from his killing disease. Her position gave her both the means and opportunity to commit the crime, and he knew that the nurse was the same woman whose husband he had shot and killed years earlier, giving her the motive.

The war was ending for Captain Eugene Stewart. He and the rest of the 85th Illinois would soon be mustered out and he’d return home to Peoria. After he entered his tent, he found a thick envelope from his mother sitting on his cot. When he unfolded the pages, another envelope fell to the ground. He picked it up and noticed the heavy hand that had written the address. It hadn’t been sent to him with the army but was forwarded by his mother. After reading his mother’s letter, he stared at the sealed envelope and thought about tossing it into the fire rather than reading it.

Max could fix anything that had moving parts., but he couldn't fix what sent him to prison for five years. Now, he was back home and had to fix a lot more than machines, and found it was almost impossible to repair people that didn’t want to be fixed.

No one had seen the innocuous rock on the long climb to the pass on the Oregon Trail, and when the last covered wagon in the long line rolled onto the lump of granite, it shouldn’t have made much of a difference, but it caused almost instant tragedy. Just seconds later, the wagon plunged over the edge of the narrow trail, then began its deadly, tumbling roll into the abyss, spewing its contents as it fell to its destruction. Her precious children had been trapped inside, and Rebecca could only watch in horror. Her children had been her life, and now she had nothing.

Erich had been treated as a freak of nature for as long as he could remember. When he was twelve, he was bigger than any fully grown man in Brainerd. His defense against the constant taunts was to retreat into a shell which marked him as a dimwitted giant. He'd been working as a blacksmith for six years when he found himself without a job and decided to leave Minnesota for the far West. Maybe in Montana Territory he would be more readily accepted as just a man and not a monster.

Kyle MacKenzie left Fort Omaha to head to do some scouting at Fort Sully in the Dakota Territory at the request of their new commander. He’d been riding west for a few hours with his packhorse in tow when he noticed a set of wagon tracks heading northwest that appeared to be just a couple of days old. It raised his curiosity, and as the tracks were going in the direction he was headed anyway, he followed.

Mattie Foster had made a terrible mistake. She had left Missouri and come to Green River, Wyoming to find her father; a father who was not the man that she even knew. Now, she was being held by two men against her will. The man who was determined to find her was a rancher. A rancher with a debt to repay.

Mack Smith had left his shop in Pueblo and was just an hour or so from reaching his brother’s ranch for his annual visit when he felt the bullet slam into his head, and when his eyes finally opened, he found himself flat on his back on the bottom of a ravine. What the hell had happened? He was only a gunsmith, not a gunfighter.

As Carl sat astride his roan gelding and stared at Pine Bluffs, he knew that his days of punching cattle were over. The long drives across the West were dying now that the railroads had crisscrossed the Plains. Ironically, his last formal education had given him the skills and knowledge to help build those railroads, and now he’d finally put them to use. His short-term plan of spending a quiet night or two in Pine Bluffs would soon be altered by a simmering man-made volcano in the mountains of central Wyoming at a mine that provided the coal for the railroad’s locomotives.

Sixteen-year-old Henry was ejected from the enormous St. Martin ranch and told never to return, or he would be shot on sight. He vowed to return and seek revenge against the entire family. When he finally returned, it wouldn’t be as Henry St. Martin, it would not be as a 16-year-old boy seeking justice for his mother, but as a hardened lawman with the name of Alex Paine.

Joey couldn’t imagine a better 13th birthday. He’d been given his first pistol and now was going to join his six older brothers on tomorrow’s job. They were going to trust him with covering their escape after robbing the bank and he was determined to do it right. He was immensely proud to be a Hogan, and his tough brothers were his heroes.

In his haste to escape a scalding death, the engine operator panicked and fell. Dylan lifted his heavy shovel as high as his 12-year-old arms could manage and swung at the thundering machine. It could've killed him, but he had to try. As the shovel’s steel head slammed into the machine, it set in motion a series of events that would shape his entire life.

Fifteen-year-old Joe Beck wasn’t listening as the minister eulogized his uncle but was already planning on what he would have to do as soon as they returned to the Quimby farm. He wasn’t welcome there even before his uncle had died and knew that his cousin John would soon order him to leave. While he had had a basic idea of where he would go after he left the farm, he didn’t know what he would do with the rest of his life.

Luke Scott just needed to track down some rustlers.The biggest question he had as he rode form his ranch was what kind of idiot rustles cattle in Colorado in December? Three hours later, as he tried to find his way to safety in a howling blizzard, just staying alive was much more important. It was what he found when seeking emergency shelter that would alter his life forever.