Chapter 1

Fargo, Dakota Territory

March 1873

The young lady gave Harry Crane a flirtatious look as she followed her father out of the general store. He smiled back at her, but it was a polite façade. She wasn’t quite his type. Besides, despite being the railway foreman’s daughter, she had a bit of a reputation among the local single men. The married ones, too. However, the position and power her father held tended to prevent the rumors from becoming more than, ostensibly, rumors falsely propagated by the young single women who had been unable to find a husband despite women being in short supply in the fledgling town.

As Harry paused, reflecting on his lonely life out in this godforsaken place over the past few years, a man passed by as he walked down the street, whistling. The music pulled Harry back to what seemed a lifetime ago.

He had been born on December 7, 1849, in a small town on the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, to a dockworker at Dayton’s port along the Miami Canal. His father was what the townspeople thought of as “a good Christian man.” Six days a week, he would wake up and start the day with a cup of coffee in the mug that rested on a misshapen mat that his daughter Deborah, Harry’s older sister, had made as her first knitting project. She was embarrassed by her amateur efforts, but even years later he would continue proudly using it as a coaster for his coffee mug. His coffee consumed, he would then head to the dock all day, coming home well after dark. His children would always wait for him to come home, and he would sit and talk with them and ask about their day for at least a short time before dragging himself to bed and starting over the next morning.

Their one day of relative leisure was Sunday. The family would all gather at the local church, as much for the church’s choir as for the teaching of the kindly, elderly widower who shepherded them. Harry smiled as he remembered Mr. Tanner, a local tailor who was also a highly talented baritone in that choir.

At 13, Harry was apprenticed to Mr. Tanner’s to learn the art of needle and thread, and of operating a business. After a year, the man trusted him enough to let him run the shop by himself from time to time — an impressive show of faith in a town where he competed with three other tailors. And even his competitors came to church to hear him sing, particularly at Christmas.

One of Mr. Tanner’s regular customers was a local factory owner. Unlike many of the factory owners who had been brought from privileged backgrounds to town by the canal, Kenneth Burke had been raised by a factory worker and had even taken his place alongside his father in the textile mill when he was of age. As such, he was there the day that the factory owner made one of his rare tours of the side of the factory with the heavy machinery. A running machine broke loose from its moorings on the floor and started to tip over, threatening to land where the man was standing. The elder Mr. Burke reacted quickly and pushed him out of the way, only for the machine to land on him, crushing him.