WESTERN HISTORICAL
Date Published: April 1, 2014
Can an angel survive Hell on Wheels? When KIT CALHOUN leaves New York City with a train car full of orphans from the Immigrant Children’s Home, she has no clue she might end up as adoptive mother to four children in rip-roaring Cheyenne, Wyoming. At twenty-two, Kit has spent most of her life in the Children’s Home. Now she acts as one of America’s first social workers, serving as liaison between the home, the courts, and the children of the streets.
Kit has little doubt she is easing the plight of the homeless children, until the transcontinental railroad begins to span the country and she is chosen to accompany orphan trains to distribute city children as fast as the rails are laid and farms are carved out of former Indian lands. Eastern cities are overrun with homeless children, their parents sick with consumption or dead of accidents and disease. The farmers who take in the children are required to sign a pledge to clothe, feed, and educate them in return for their labor. Is this distribution of urban children to rural environs beneficial, as the churches that sponsor the dissemination insist? Kit begins to have misgivings.
Family ties are deliberately broken so that single children will have a better chance of being placed. Even so, Kit swears an oath to a dying woman that she will keep her son and daughter together. But when their train passes beyond the last settlements in Nebraska, Kit is left with no other choice. HANNAH and HELMUT, and teenagers CONNIE and THOMAS, become Kit’s sole responsibility.
The first time handsome PATRICK KELLEY lays eyes on Kit inside the Casement Brothers store where he works in Julesburg, Colorado Territory, he wants her for his own. But circumstances, and a spectral-looking demented gambler as well as Kit’s certainty no one in his right mind would want her cobbled-together family, conspire to keep them apart. When Patrick and Kit and her brood ride Hell on Wheels into Cheyenne, they’re all forced to leave behind everything they knew and find ways to survive and thrive in the raw new American West.
EXCERPT:
Cheyenne, Dakota Territory, January
1868
Panic bloomed, threatening to choke Kit
as she gasped for breath. Where could she be, the small girl brought
all the way out to the wilds of Wyoming from New York City? So
certain she could make the best decisions for the little
golden-haired girl, Kit had gone against her own upbringing as well
as the stern advice of those older and wiser in order to make this
journey west. Now here was her little family plunked down in the raw
boomtown of Cheyenne, and she had lost not only her own direction but
also the child entrusted to her care.
Where could Hannah be? Where?
The streets slimy with melting snow and
horse manure, Kit struggled to keep her footing as she ran
frantically up one and down another, screaming Hannah’s name.
Unable to think where to look next, at last she stood helplessly
wringing her hands. Tears made slow, cold tracks down her face.
A door opened behind her, and a voice
full of concern said, “Kit. As luck would have it, I was just
coming to look for you.”
And wouldn’t you know it? The voice
of the very man who seemed to turn up at every instance of her bad
luck. Indeed, he might be the root cause of her ill luck ever since
she left New York City. And to think he had once promised to be her
salvation, did Patrick Kelley of the dancing Irish green eyes.
But what were his true intentions as he
took hold of her arm? To save her? Or to be her final ruination, as
she suspected?
“Let me go.” She tried to wrench
her arm away. “Hannah is missing. She’s lost. I must find her!”
“Ah, leannán, don’t take on
so,” he said in a soft, cajoling voice. “Hannah is safe and
sound. I have her.”
Kit’s bones suddenly felt soft, as if
they had turned to mush, and her knees started to sag. Ah, God, and
wasn’t her luck running true? Patrick Kelley, the very man! Of all
the places in Cheyenne that Hannah might take refuge, of course it
would turn out to be with saloon-keeper, and the means of the erosion
of many a young woman’s morals, Patrick Kelley.
“Come inside, please, Kit,” he
insisted, tugging her arm. Her feet were frozen inside boots soaked
with street muck. She felt herself weakening toward him, the warmth
and light of him, and of the place behind him, beckoning seductively
to her.
She had come so far, all the while
thinking she knew what she was doing. Most of a year had passed since
setting out. She had followed a path on a journey of more than two
thousand miles, a path of righteousness that she thought would answer
all eventualities.
And then her path, and the paths of the
children, crossed Patrick Kelley’s.
Now once more she must break down and
choose between her lofty principles and a future tied to Patrick
Kelley. And she found, to her utter consternation as she stared into
eyes the color of shamrocks, she…still…couldn’t… decide.
My review
A copy received from Reading Addiction Virtual Tour for an honest review
four stars
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Alethea Williams
Alethea Williams: Western history has been the great interest of my adult life. I've lived in Wyoming, Colorado, and Oregon. Although an amateur historian, I am happiest researching different times and places in the historical West. And while staying true to history, I try not to let the facts overwhelm my stories. Story always comes first in my novels, and plot arises from the relationships between my characters. I'm always open to reader response to my writing.
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