Wildest Dreams - By Rosanne Bittner Page 0,18

have a good father."

Lettie squeezed his hands and nodded.

"Go with God, my precious," Katie told her daughter. "And always know you are surrounded with our love. If anything—" She glanced at Luke, then back to Lettie. "If anything goes wrong, you can always come to us. You know that."

"We'll be all right, Mama." Lettie kissed her mother once more, took one last look at her family, then turned and ran to the wagon.

Luke nodded to all of them. "Please don't worry about her. I love her very much, and I have big plans. She'll have a fine home someday and be living in luxury. That's a promise.

Henry shook his hand once more. "I believe you, son. God go with you."

Luke turned away and walked to the wagon, picking up a switch and giving one of the two lead oxen a little snap, with an order to get under way. Lettie sat in the seat clinging to Nathan, who in turn clung to his stuffed horse. She could not resist looking back once more. She waved and Nathan did the same, smiling, oblivious to what all the crying was about. In his little mind he was simply setting off on a great adventure with his mother and the nice man called Luke. He was telling grandma and grandpa good-bye, but it would only be for a day or two, wouldn't it?

"'Tana," the boy said, pointing to the wagons ahead of them.

"Yes, Nathan," Lettie answered. "We're going to Montana."

CHAPTER 4

Lettie shivered, pulling the bearskin blanket Luke had bought her in Billings closer around herself. Nathan lay sleeping in her lap, bundled into a warm blanket. "It looks empty," Lettie told Luke, her eyes on a small cabin that sat nestled into the side of a foothill several yards away.

Luke turned up the collar of his own wolfskin jacket against a stinging wind that hammered at them out of the nearby mountains. "Appears that way." He reached under the wagon seat and retrieved his Winchester, then climbed down. "Stay put."

Lettie watched anxiously as he approached the cabin. Sure, there's plenty of free land yet just southwest of here, the land agent in Billings had told them. If you can wrestle it from the outlaws who use it to hide stolen cattle and horses. The man's name was David Taylor, a short, stocky soul who had hinted that he would not be particular with facts and figures if Luke wanted to claim a little more than the 160 acres he was allowed under the Homestead Act. Lettie didn't trust Taylor one bit, and she wondered how much money the man was making on the side by accepting money to "alter" deeds and land boundaries.

It mattered little at the moment. Right now, Luke had to decide on the land he wanted to claim in the first place, and as soon as they had come over the last rise and he saw the wide valley stretched out before them, he knew what he wanted. Although there was a dusting of snow over all of it, he could see acres and acres of winter grass. She prayed Taylor was right that the outlaws who roamed these parts usually didn't show up until spring. They needed a place to hole up for the winter without having to spend money on room and board. When Luke had spotted this little cabin across the valley, backed by splendid mountains that seemed to watch over it like sentinels, he was sure they were "home." He had driven the wagon up to the cabin, and now was inspecting it to see if anyone had lived there recently.

Lettie suspected the place was not livable. She watched Luke go inside, waited, weary from the weeks of hard travel it had taken to get here. They had managed to latch onto another wagon train heading out of Fort Laramie north to Billings in Montana Territory. From there the others went on west into the Rockies to look for gold, in spite of the danger of Indian attack. Luke was more interested in claiming land, and the first thing he had done was find the land agent. Taylor's office was nothing more than the corner of a sorry-looking saloon in a settlement that was hardly big enough to be called a town, but the citizens of Billings seemed proud of their accomplishments. Taylor himself was not so proud. He seemed to detest his job and detest the entire area, a government man doing only what he'd