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knew his father wouldn’t allow him to go. He knew what would happen if he tried to leave home. But this was his one chance to be his own man. To live free from Solomon McAllen’s constant threats and demands to control.
    He glanced at his silent brother and wondered if the last time he’d tried to leave was on Shelly’s mind as well.
    Patrick had been fifteen when he’d signed on for a cattle drive leaving Galveston. He’d thought it would be a grand adventure and hadn’t listened to his father’s rant. Only, the day the drive pulled out his father found him and dragged him back home. Solomon had strung Patrick up in the barn and almost beat him to death while preaching all the while about how a son should obey his father.
    Shelly had been almost seventeen then and tried to stop the beating. Their father had blacked his eye and broken two of his ribs before he yelled for the women to hold the dummy down or he’d kill him.
    Shelly had struggled against his four older sisters, but they’d held him until Patrick’s back and legs were raw and Solomon’s youngest son was more dead than alive. After weeks of nursing him back, Patrick’s stepmother had simply said he should have listened. As Solomon’s favorite target, she probably thought she knew best, but from that day to this Patrick had planned his next escape. Now, at twenty, he was making it happen.
    Since he’d talked to Spencer’s oldest daughter and she’d agreed to marry him, everything had gone as planned. Shelly and he had loaded the extra wagon with the bare necessities he’d need on the trip and left it in the north pasture until tonight.
    Patrick took his bath and laid out his Sunday clothes as he’d done every Saturday night since he could remember. But tonight he’d also packed a grain sack with his other clothes and waited by the window until everyone in the house was asleep.
    All had gone smoothly during the week. Their father accepted Shelly taking over the weekly mail pickup but didn’t speak to him when Shelly brought it in. To Solomon, Shelly was less than a son because he couldn’t talk. Their father didn’t seem to think that he could hear either. He’d blamed their mother for the birth defect and chose to ignore his own son.
    Patrick had tried to tell their father that it was Shelly, not him, who was the gifted carpenter, but Solomon didn’t listen. They’d gone as boys to help their big brothers build houses and churches in the area. When their two oldest brothers died in the war, and the middle two, only five years older than Shelly, ran away, Solomon told everyone in his small congregation that they’d gone to the devil, and he’d kill his own flesh and blood before he’d lose another son to Satan.
    Patrick smiled, remembering his father’s words. Come morning Solomon would lose another son, and there was nothing he could do about it. He took a deep breath of the humid Galveston air, thinking that tonight he could smell freedom, and at twenty it was about time.
    The old buckboard was too light to leave noticeable tracks. Once they made Houston tonight, their trail would mix with a hundred others and no one would be able to track them.
    “You don’t have to go with me to the ferry,” Patrick said to his brother. “I know what you’re thinking. I need a best man. But we’ll be lucky to find a preacher still awake in Galveston.”
    Shelly simply nodded. He’d obviously made up his mind. He would guard his brother until Patrick was off the island.
    “It’ll take you half the night to walk back home.” Patrick did what he always did when nervous: He talked. “Did I tell you about how Annie Spencer came out to the barn after I delivered the firewood to her place? She’s got it worse than we do stuck in the house with her stepmother. The old lady treats her bad. They don’t even give her time off to go to church with the rest of the family. I told her once when I was delivering eggs that I wished I could leave