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humor lasted to the main road and even beyond the sight of skinny cattle overgrazing worn-out land. It might be too much to hope for, but maybe Miss Carteret really had what it took to survive what he feared was going to be a winter to remember. If she stayed that long.
    Who was he kidding? Of course she would stay. He knew Clarence Carteret was not a man to plan ahead. His daughter would find out soon enough that her father probably expected her to help him .
    It was on the tip of his tongue to warn the pretty lady beside him that if she had any money, she needed to squirrel it away, maybe hide it in her corset. Clarence Carteret had a bad habit of thinking he would win at cards.
    Jack Sinclair said nothing. His mother had raised him better than that.

C HAPTER 6

    Y ou’ll see the Bar Dot over this next rise,” Jack told Lily. “The Cheyenne L&C has five ranches in this district, and this is the smallest. Just fifty thousand acres.”
    Lily knew she would have to reorder her idea of small and large, but she had been thinking that all the way through Nebraska and into Wyoming Territory, where everything seemed larger, from the sky on down.
    “ Just ? Thank goodness for that! I could probably take a little stroll and not get lost on a mere fifty thousand acres.”
    Mr. Sinclair chuckled at her little joke. He stopped at the rise, and there was the ranch spread out below. “That’s the big house where the Buxtons live,” he said, pointing to a smallish two-story house of regular boards, the only such building. “Horse barn, a barn or two, bunkhouse, cookshack—we all eat there; you too, probably—and my little place.” He counted in the air with his finger. “Your father’s place is farther away, and there are corrals and more sheds than we know what to do with.” He tipped his hat back. “You’ll find any number of hounds, but they won’t bother you. I advise you to avoid the cat, a tom named Freak.”
    Lily felt the silliness overtook her. “A cat ? You’re all afraid of a cat?”
    “You will be too.” But he was still grinning. “There’s not a mouse on the place, no small feat.”
    Lily shook her head over the cat. She looked at the ranch spread below, not certain what she had expected to find at the Bar Dot. It looked more like a bedraggled village than her idea of a ranch, gleaned from a Western novel or two she would never admit to having read. She noticed another log building nearby on the wagon road. “Over there?”
    “That’s a schoolhouse Mrs. Buxton demanded we build. No one uses it.”
    “Why ever not?”
    “What would induce an Eastern schoolmarm on the search for a husband to drop everything and rush to all this splendid isolation to teach a coupla kids?”
    Indeed, why? Lily thought. I would never do it .
    He shook his head. “There it sits, too far away to be of any practical use. Mrs. Buxton wanted to make sure that whoever ended up there had plenty of cold air to breathe in and out, on the way to an education. It’s healthy, she claims.”
    “Seriously?”
    “She actually told me that.” He frowned then, maybe thinking he had said too much about the people who employed him. “You’ll understand better when you meet her. I’ll take you around tomorrow.”
    And that was the end of any more confidences from the foreman. Lily brushed a stray hair from her face where the wind had teased it. So many cattle everywhere—too many. She shivered inwardly, wondering—not for the first time—why the people who made the decisions never seemed to know as much as the people they employed. Thank goodness it wasn’t her problem. No one ever listened to her either.
    Mr. Sinclair spoke to the horses and they started toward the odd conglomeration of buildings and corrals that made up the Bar Dot, plus one isolated schoolhouse.
    No one seemed to be about, but cheery smoke poured from the cookshack chimney. Her stomach growled, too loud to be ignored.
    “Beg pardon,” she murmured,