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looked so hopeful that Juliana’s throat tightened.
    “I’ll hear your reading lesson after supper,” she relented.
    Joseph’s grin warmed her like sunshine. “I promise I’ll do good,” he said.
    “Well,” Juliana said. “You will do well , Joseph, not ‘good’.”
    He nodded, clearly placating her.
    When Juliana turned back to Gracie, she saw that the child was leaning against Lincoln’s side, sniffling, her arms around his lean waist. The flow of tears had stopped.
    “Saint Nicholas is going to bring me a dictionary for Christmas,” Gracie announced. She looked up at her father. “Do you think he got my letter, Papa? He won’t bring me a doll or anything like that, just because you already have a dictionary on your desk and he thinks I could use that instead of having one of my own? Yours is old —a lot of words aren’t even in it.”
    Lincoln grinned, tugged lightly at one of Gracie’s ringlets. “I’m sure Saint Nick got your letter, sweetheart,” he said.
    “Who’s that?” Theresa asked, trailing into the room, hair unbrushed. Juliana wondered if Lincoln had heard her prayers, as he probably had Gracie’s. Told her to sleep well.
    “You don’t know who Saint Nicholas is?” Gracie asked, astounded.
    “We’ll discuss him later,” Juliana promised, “when we sit down for lessons after breakfast.”
    “I could recite,” Gracie offered. “I know all about Saint Nicholas.”
    “Gracie,” Lincoln said.
    “Well, I do , Papa. I’ve read Mr. Moore’s poem dozens of times.”
    “We’ll have cornmeal mush,” Tom decided aloud. “Maybe some sausage.”
    “What?” Lincoln asked.
    “Breakfast,” Tom explained with a slight grin. Then he turned to Joseph. “You know how to use a separator, boy?”
    Joseph nodded. “We had a milk cow out at the school,” he said. “For a while.”
    Separating the milk from the cream had always been Theresa’s chore, since Joseph considered it “woman’s work.” Mary Rose and Angelique had taken turns churning the butter.
    And then the cow had sickened and died, and Mr. Philbert hadn’t requisitioned the government for another.
    Sadness and frustration swept over Juliana, and it must have shown in her face, because, to her utter surprise, Lincoln laid a hand on her shoulder.
    Something startling and fiery raced through her at histouch. She nearly flinched, and she saw by his expression that he’d noticed.
    “Sit down,” he said, watching with amusement in his dark eyes as she blushed with an oddly delicious mortification. “I’ll get you some coffee.”

Chapter Three
    T he sky was a clear, heart-piercing blue, and sunshine glittered on fields of snow rolling to the base of the foothills and crowning the trees. Creek water shimmered beneath sheets of ice, and the cattle, more than a hundred of them, milled and bawled, impatient for the first load of hay to hit the ground. Lincoln sat in the saddle, his horse restless beneath him, and pulled his hat down over his eyes against the dazzling glare.
    He watched as Joseph climbed into the back of the sleigh—the snow was too deep out on the range for awagon to pass—while Tom soothed the two enormous draft horses hitched to it.
    Ben Gainer, a young ranch hand who’d stayed on for the winter because his wife, Rose-of-Sharon, was soon to be delivered of their first child, rode up alongside Lincoln on a spotted pony, a shovel in one hand.
    “Best break up some of that ice on the creek,” Gainer said.
    Lincoln nodded, swung down from the saddle. It was there to be done, as his father used to say. When cattle weren’t hungry, they were thirsty, and they weren’t smart enough to eat snow or trample the ice with their hooves so they could get to the water beneath. He went to the sleigh, helped himself to one of the pickaxes Tom had brought along.
    Wishing, as he sometimes did, that he’d chosen an easier life—Beth’s father had offered him a partnership in his Boston law firm—Lincoln went to