Prologue

Annual Harvest Play

Big Bend Consolidated School

Big Bend, Colorado

October 1890

Sixteen-year-old Cole Stewart leaned against the back wall of the clapboard schoolhouse, flanked by his two best friends, Ronnie and Charlie Stout. Like his buddies, Cole was grateful the last-year students weren’t required to participate in the harvest festival, other than building props and moving the heavier stuff from one place to the next.

“I don’t know about you fellas,” Cole whispered, “but I can’t wait to get outta here.”

“Where?” Ronnie asked. “The school play?”

“Naw,” Cole responded. “I mean Big Bend. This town is too small for me. I wanna do more important things.”

“Like what? Charlie wondered.

Cole straightened up, stepping away from the wall and puffing out his skinny chest for emphasis. “When I turn eighteen, I’m gonna join the army.”

“Yeah, like your old man would ever let—”

Whatever Ronnie was about to say was interrupted by the lifting of the curtain—a crooked affair made from two strung-together quilts—on a stage hastily constructed from scrap wood. Mister Johnson, the ancient schoolmaster coughed loudly to get the small crowd’s attention.

“Welcome everyone to our annual fall harvest presentation. The children from grades one through six have put together something special for you to enjoy.”

A subdued round of applause echoed through the room, interrupted only slightly by Jillian Carson’s loud shouts of support. The woman was strange. Eccentric his mama had always said, rest her soul. Pa just called the Carson lady ‘ weird ’.

Cole supposed ‘ weird ’ was a relative term when it came to the Carson family. Nobody in town knew where they’d came from other than they just showed up one day about eight years ago. Miss Jillian, her daughter Flo, and the two-year old child. Then, about a month after they arrived, the daughter took off again and never returned, leaving her little girl named Eliza in her grandmother’s care.

On his left, Charlie snickered and pointed toward the stage. “What in the dickens is that Carson girl wearing?”

Cole narrowed his attention to the side of the stage where ten-year old Eliza was dressed like a scarecrow and dancing around like someone possessed by what his pa called, ‘ the evils of drink ’.

“She’s certainly colorful,” Cole commented, giving Charlie a poke in the side. “And she didn’t even need to paint on the freckles.”

“Eliza Carson is as strange as her mamaw,” Ronnie whispered. “Maybe even worse.”

He thought about Ronnie’s claim. Yes, the girl was different than most kids her age, but he likened that to her unusual upbringing. His pa, the town’s only lawman, had been sent out to Miss Jillian’s home on a couple of occasions, and always came back shaking his head.

‘ Crazy old lady’ , Pa would say. ‘ Trying to grow some strange looking plants that has the neighbors upset .’

Cole wasn’t sure why what Miss Jillian grew in her garden was anyone’s business, but he kept his thoughts to himself. The last thing he wanted was for the townspeople to realize he thought the woman’s habits were more entertaining than dangerous.

He turned his attention back to the stage. The six or seven students were reciting their lines without much enthusiasm, kind of dragging themselves across the floorboards in unison as they spoke. Eliza, on the other hand, was nearly shouting her lines, moving around that stage as if she owned it. Making the crowd laugh. Cole just wasn’t sure if they were laughing with her, or at her.

For whatever reason he couldn’t begin to understand, he felt the need to defend Eliza, protect her. It was a job he’d been called on to do more than once in the schoolyard when the other children would taunt her. He saw looking out for her as an extension of his father’s duties as sheriff.

You’d think she’d be grateful. Yet, the last time he’d intervened, she promptly told him to ‘ mind his own beeswax ’ and kicked him soundly in the shins.