She straightened and winced as her back muscles protested. Squinting against the late afternoon sunlight, she thought about her dream and frowned. She'd been back there, under Ray's thumb, little more than a maidservant to him and his sons, her stepbrothers. The wagon hit a bump and her woolen shawl almost slipped from around her shoulders. She was certainly no longer in St. Louis. For the past five months, she'd traveled with a wagon train headed to Santa Fe, New Mexico, over some of the roughest, most dangerous terrain in the entire country. The middle-aged priest who had traveled with her from Pueblo Mission nodded toward the horizon. "Look, Miss Harmon," he said. Lorilla craned her neck but all she saw were the other wagons and the same red hills she had seen for days. Red hills and odd, dark green trees. But then, her eyes were drawn to a patch of paler red. "Oh, look!" she cried. "A town. That's Santa Fe, isn't it?" The cluster of rose-colored buildings sat nestled in a valley.
