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daughter. She couldn’t even look at Dianne without seeing Ephraim dead in the street. It wasn’t really Dianne’s fault. As Trenton had said, decent folk should be able to walk the streets without armed escorts. Still, she had gone to the bank without protection and Ephraim might be alive now except for that one fact. Even Trenton—
    Trenton .
    She’d seen nothing of him at all that day. She needed to talk to him now that he’d had time to calm down. She needed to make him understand that she appreciated his desire to see justice done for his father, but she also needed him to realize it wouldn’t be had in violence.
    Tucking her papers into her apron pocket, Susannah climbed the stairs to the boys’ shared room. She noted with satisfaction that each of the three beds had been made. She’d allow for nothing less and her boys knew the penalties for messiness.
    Going to Trenton’s corner of the room, Susannah felt something akin to fear overcome her. She opened the trunk at the foot of the bed and found it nearly empty. Going to his bed, she raised the covers on the side to peer under the frame. His rifle was gone—so, too, his revolver.
    She dropped her hold on the covers and whirled around to sit down. “He’s gone.” She felt tears well up but refused to cry. How could he do this to us? How could he desert us when I told him what it would cost him?
    Dianne peered into her cedar chest. She’d been storing household items here ever since her father and mother had given her the box on her thirteenth birthday. They’d said she was to save doilies and embroidered pieces of work for her own home some day, but Dianne had never worried overmuch about such things. She had received several pieces when Grandma Chadwick passed on, but they were more sweet reminders than useful household goods.
    Taking Trent’s letter from her pocket, Dianne reached up to her dressing table and pulled down a dried flower. The pressed blossom was from her father’s funeral. Gently stroking the petals, she felt tears come to her eyes. Trent’s leaving and her father’s death … both were her fault. She placed the flower in the folds of Trent’s letter and tucked it deep into the chest. There was no time for mourning now. She had far too much work to do. Dianne was determined to make her mother as happy as possible, and if that meant working her fingers to the bone, then that was how it would be.
    “I’ll drive oxen, cook and wash over a campfire, sleep on the ground—whatever it takes,” she murmured, packing her blouses atop her memory pieces. She added undergarments, stockings, and a pair of satin dancing shoes she’d worn the first time she’d danced with Sally’s brother Robbie.
    “Whatever has to be done,” she told herself aloud, “I must have the strength to do. If I work hard enough—if I give more than the others, then maybe, just maybe, Mama will forgive me.”

    “I’m so glad you stopped by before we left,” Dianne told her friends Ramona, Sally, and Ruthanne, who had come to bid her farewell. They’d also come bearing gifts.
    “Mama said I could give you this,” Sally told Dianne. It was a small collection of Godey’s Lady’s Book magazines from 1859. “I know they’re out of date, but since the war, Ma’s had a hard time getting any kind of publication from back East.”
    “Oh, Sally, that’s so sweet,” Dianne said as she leafed through the first one. “Why, it shows how to knit these sweet little stockings.”
    “It has all sorts of wonderful stories and such too. There are fashion designs, patterns to crochet and embroider… . It even tells you how to set a proper table. You’ll be out there in the middle of the wilderness and … well, you might forget.”
    Dianne laughed and closed the magazine. “Indeed, I might very well take to eating with my fingers.”
    Sally frowned. “Don’t think me so ignorant that I would believe that of you.”
    Dianne gently touched her friend’s arm.