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know our circumstances as well as I do. But Laura hasn’t had much experience with men like you!”
    To add to her irritation, he laughed. “Neither have you,” he said softly.
    “Enough to know a jackass when I see one.”
    “You are the most willful, balky, pigheaded woman I’ve ever met, but I still think you’ll do nicely when I get you broken in.”
    Tucker allowed his words to wash over her, knowing full well he was trying to provoke her. They
walked the last few yards in silence, and as soon as he released her arm she went quickly to the end of the wagon.
    Lucas watched her go, a peculiar emotion moving through him. There was something about this one that goaded him to anger her. Why did he go out of his way to make her hate him? And why in the hell had he kissed her? He certainly hadn’t meant to. But never had he touched lips so sweet, or flesh so soft, and never had he had to force himself to allow a woman to leave his arms. He scowled to himself. It was that damn portrait he had carried so long.
    Lucas stretched out on his bedroll beneath the freight wagon. A poignant loneliness possessed him for the first time in a long while. Far away a coyote called to his mate and her answer echoed in the stillness. He was filled with a quiet unrest; his thoughts raced. For a moment he speculated on how it would be if the redheaded woman responded to him out of love. How would it be if she whispered words of love in his ear, and there was a softening in her eyes when they stared up into his? He suddenly felt the desire to recall all the details of that time long ago when for a few short weeks he had known love. He turned restlessly in his bed and wondered about the strange, twisting feeling that was churning inside him.
    The first trip he made to California was in ’44 when he was twelve years old. That was fifteen years ago. He and his father had left his dear, gentle, Scottish mother and his sisters buried beneath the pines behind the farmhouse in East Texas after the scarlet fever had
taken them. They made it all the way to the Pacific coast, and there they found the same kind of people they had left in Texas—people with tawdry dreams of making a fortune—possessive, crowding in, taming the land.
    William Steele took his son to the mountains, and it was there, by his father’s side, that Lucas killed his first bear, wrestled Indian boys, and learned to wear black, oiled buckskins and moccasins. He had hunted with Gray Eagle and tumbled his sister, Little Dove, in the bushes. It was a happy, carefree time of his life. He was twenty years old when he and his father made another trip over the trail. Texas had changed; towns were springing up, county lines were being drawn, settlers were moving in.
    They returned to the mountains of California. William Steele had seen Texas for the last time. He died swiftly, an arrow in his throat, and his son buried him beside a mountain stream. It was during that first lonely winter Lucas found Shining Star. She was a Crow, a white Crow. Somewhere on the Oregon Trail a train had been raided, and Shining Star had been taken from her family and passed farther and farther west and then south. She had become more Indian than white. But she was not an Indian and she was not white.
    When Lucas found her, she was second wife to Running Horse. Running Horse was old, he was not happy: he had no sons. Shining Star hoed and weeded the rough fields, rubbed fur for dresses, pounded clothes by the stream. She had not understood why
other girls went to sleep with the warriors and enjoyed it, had not understood why she bore no children to make her life more comfortable.
    Lucas traded a pony and a knife for Shining Star, and she came to live with him in the lonely cabin. She took pride in belonging to the mountain man and in time came to love him. He, too, came to love the gentle girl with the soothing hands and the soft brown eyes who held him to her breast and crooned to him. It had been long