It was already April… but that didn't matter the prairie. When it wanted to snow, it snowed. When it wanted to cover every surface with ice crystals, it did it.
The team of horses attached to the loaded wagon should not have to pull in this weather, but they were there. The icy glaze slewed the hooves of the animals, and the sliding wagon crashed into the stone ledge. The man and woman were killed, but what was hurled from the wagon and caught in the branches of a bois d'arc * tree was very much alive.
Angel 734 was well able to protect the infant in the native cradleboard but the baby was not a native. She was a highland lassie with roots in Scotland, and the prairie was to be her home… as soon as Solomon Tanner picked her off the limbs of the bois d'arc tree. As the tree was on his property, so was the baby girl, and no sensible person was going to change his mind.
*Pronounced “Bow Dark”
