Read Blizzard: Colorado, 1886 for Free Online

more about her parents.
    Maggie’s hands were almost numb and she stoked the fire to warm up. Once the pins-and-needles feeling in her hands had let up enough so she wouldn’t be clumsy, Maggie got down her hiking knapsack. For a moment she wondered if she really needed to pack anything, but she knew that if her father were here, he would insist that she be prepared for an emergency. Maggie whispered a prayer that her parents were safe in Lyons and that the doctor could help her father. Then she set to work.
    She filled her canteen with dark, sweet coffee and wrapped up a piece of venison. She put four biscuits in a napkin, then put all the food in a clean flour sack. She got her extra trousers and two thick flannel shirts and pushed them all into the bottom of her knapsack. She put the food in on top, then found thewaxed matchbox and filled it with wooden matches. Last of all, she packed the bone-handled pocketknife that had belonged to her grandfather.
    For a second, she thought about carrying a blanket, too, but it seemed foolish to risk getting any of their bedding wet or dirty. She could hardly do wash in this weather. Then she thought about her father’s bedroll. He kept it in the barn; she would tie it to her saddle before she left just in case. Maggie drew the knapsack’s strings tight, then tied a slipknot to hold it closed.
    Maggie glanced at the clock on the mantel. It had stopped at nine the night before. She had forgotten to wind it—that was something her father always did before he went to bed. Maggie put on her faded blue coat and went out again.
    As Maggie turned Rusty down the rutted road, the snowflakes thinned a little. Riding as fast as she dared, she pushed Rusty into a trot where the snow wasn’t deep and the ground wasn’t rocky. She kept her eyes moving, aware of the forest on both sides of the road. At first she followed Hadyn’s tracks, but she lost them where he had crisscrossed the road trying to find a way around a snowdrift.
    It was hard to ride into the wind. The snow flurried, then stopped, then started again, but the wind was constant. Maggie hoped it wouldn’t keep rising. Sometimes in the winter, they got winds strong enough to bend the pine trees like saplings.
    The road was slick and rutted. Along the top of a ridge, where the snow was a shallow dusting on the frozen earth, she managed to canter for a few hundred yards before the drifts deepened again and she had to rein in.
    When Rusty slowed, Maggie glanced upward. The sky was darkening. She prayed once more that her father was going to be all right. There were three doctors in Lyons. Surely one of them could help him.
    Maggie rode on. She could hear wind sighing in the treetops. Rusty settled into a rambling walk, covering the rough rocky stretch of the road that led down to Black Canon Creek, then back up. Here, on the north-facing slope, the ground was completely covered with snow.
    Maggie suddenly noticed an odd, uneven set of tracks setting off from the road at a sharp angle. She rode closer. They were boot tracks, about the right size. Hadyn?
    Maggie slid out of her saddle and led Rusty to the prints in the snow. The wind was softening their edges; it wouldn’t be long before they would be filled in completely. If she had waited another day to ride the road, she might never have seen them at all.
    A perfect print, sheltered between two rocks, caught her eye. She could even see the pattern of the shoe nails, a half circle in the center of the heel. It was Hadyn. No one in Estes Park wore fancy boots like that. Maggie slapped the reins against her thigh. Why had Hadyn left the road? She stared down into the pines, then led Rusty along the side of the road, trying to see where Hadyn had come back up the slope. After she had gone a few hundred yards, she began to feel uneasy. If he had just been answering a call of nature, he wouldn’t have gone very far off the road. Snowflakes settled on