The Whippoorwill Trilogy - Sharon Sala Page 0,266

States of America, and the laws of the land. And, because of his background, he was struggling with the current mood of his fellow Southerners.

The suggestion from the Northern States that slavery should be outlawed, had set the emotions of the South on fire. It challenged and threatened their livelihood in a way they could not ignore. There was no way the big landowners could operate their vast plantations without slave labor, and the Southerners were of the opinion that the Northern states had no business trying to regulate or change their way of life.

The Honorable Joshua Dean knew that, if the rumblings actually came to fruition and the southern states seceded from the Union as they were threatening to do, he would not be able to stay true to himself and still reside in the place where he’d been born.

The problem was, Joshua Dean was a man with thinking ahead of his time—a man who did not believe in the buying and selling of other human beings. He also held to an unpopular theory that the blacks were not lesser beings, but simply a race of people with a different way of living, and that just because they’d been sold into slavery, it should not reflect upon their capacity for learning or being treated fairly.

Because he’d been unable to make a decision as to which side to back, he’d made an unusual choice. He’d opted to remove himself from the discord before he was forced to make a stand.

Going west into the territories had been an option he’d considered, as had taking himself to Europe—possibly England or France. But he considered the British a cold-mannered nation, and since he didn’t speak French, the decision had been made for him. West it was.

He’d been in the territories for just over six months, and the news he got from home convinced him that he’d done the right thing. Every day the southern states came closer and closer to seceding, at which point, he just kept taking himself further West.

He had enough judicial pull to get himself an appointment as a judge, and was actually enjoying traveling from one outpost to another, delivering justice whenever it was needed. Of course, he had to accept that, more often than not, the people who populated these places were accustomed to meting out their own brand of justice. Several times he’d traveled days at great discomfort only to discover that the locals had taken the law into their own hands and hanged an offender without due process of the law. In those instances, he’d rendered his disapproval and moved on before he became the next target of their ire.

Such was the case when he received word that a judge was needed in Denver City. He started out with a sense of fatalism. Either he got there before a crowd mentality developed, or he didn’t. Considering there was an ongoing gold strike, he could only imagine what might be waiting for his disposition.

Amos Trueblood, a middle-aged man with the physique of a scarecrow, stood on the back steps of his bank building, absently tracing the part in his thin and graying hair as he watched the rush of flood waters a few hundred yards below. His long black topcoat and black pants were stained around the hems with mud splatters. His shoes, normally shined, were filthy and rimmed with dried mud. No matter how many times a day he cleaned them, at the end of a day, they were still filthy.

In the early days when he’d first opened for business, he’d worried about many things, including being robbed. But he’d never imagined, on his worst day, that he might be ruined by a flood.

He had opened the bank less than two months after the first gold strike had been made in the area. In loaning money to first one prospector then another, he’d acquired, by default, more than a dozen claims. While he had no intention of panning for gold, he was more than happy to acquire the land. He had a feeling that, one day, this boom town was going to make it past the gold strike, to grow into an honest to God city. When it did, he would be in on the ground floor in development. However, if the flood waters didn’t stop rising, he was going to have to rethink his future plans.

Last night when the rain had ceased, he had hopes that today would be the day the flood would crest.