Chapter 1

Dixie Hardin was only sixteen when the hooded riders swooped down on her parent's forty acres with a whole lot of whooping and drunken laughter. The hired guns of the beef industry consortium made short work of her near-sighted father with his pitiful shotgun and her older brother with the Henry rifle that had a broken sight. Her poor mother ran out to pull them out of the dust and she was bowled over by a rider just for sport.

The sight of her mother lying motionless in the dirt was enough to get Dixie's Irish up and she lined her sights up real careful on the drunken neer-do-well who had ridden her mama down and let him have a hot piece of lead right through his despicable open laughing mouth. It got a mite quiet for a short spell after that what with four bodies lying lifeless in the front yard. The baby was wailing non-stop in the crib next to the pot-bellied stove letting the attackers know the cabin was not empty of still living sod-busters as yet.

The milling horses and shouting hooded men stayed circling in the distance for a while and then rode off back in the direction of the "Rocking R" to report to their crippled master Jake McMannis about the outcome of their aborted raid. The lead raider was a nasty piece of work called "Tex" from down near the Pecos who had a habit of constantly fondling the butt of his cross-draw iron like it was a girl's bottom. He was the one who had done in both Dixie's father and her beloved older brother Pete.

Dixie hushed the baby and told Manuela the Mexican woman hired by her parents to wet nurse baby Jonathan because her mother was in such a bad way after the birth. With both her parents lying in the dust outside, the baby was all the family Dixie had left unless you counted Manuela and the shiftless Indian worker her father had hired for room and board to help him with the fences and the digging up of stumps. The Indian only carried a long sharp knife which was totally useless in a gunfight. He sat in the corner watching everything with those expressionless black eyes that announced he had seen it all lots of times before.

She checked the pantry and saw that she had plenty of ammo for her Winchester was running low on the shotgun shells. Dixie didn't see any Henry ammo anywhere but it was a moot point because the rifle was practically worthless without a functioning sight anyway.

"Running Eagle, I need you to help me put those bodies outside in the ground."

The stoic Indian managed a terse rejoinder entirely uncharacteristic of his nature.

"Missy, better put on fire and burn all into the happy hunting ground!"

She was aghast at the thought because it was almost like a desecration of the dead in her bible-raised mind. Still, she knew the usually silent American native was trying to make things simple for her. His face set in a mask when she handed him the spare shovel and they both started digging new holes next to your young brother Ned who had fallen from a bucking horse right on his head snapping his neck like one of the chickens she helped prepare for Sunday dinner.

Dixie took the dirty hired gunman's gun-belt off his body before rolling him into the hole and was pleased to see there were almost thirty rounds shoved into the loops. The idiot still had four rounds still in the cylinder of the six-shooter so she was happy with the added firepower in case the hired yahoos returned to finish the job. She wrapped her family in the bed-linens since they wouldn't be needing them any longer and when they had shoveled all the dirt back on top of them she said a little prayer silently to herself because she didn't want to offend the non-Christian Sioux Indian who was more attuned to the chanting of a medicine man than the soft-spoken words of an immature female.

Manuela was inside tending baby Jonathan and fixing some tortillas for dinner. Dixie suspected the Mexican woman was a little simple minded but it didn't seem to affect her ability to do a lot of different chores and she was a big help ever since she wandered in off of the dirt track that ran right next to their fence.

The nearest farm was at the end of the long valley and the two brothers who worked it were not what she would call overly sociable. Still, they were familiar faces and she wanted to let the other farmers know that had happened to her family so they could band together to fight off the range riders who were dedicated to their eradication.

Manuela was actually humming a little tune inside the cabin but it didn't upset Dixie because she knew it was better to be distanced from the stark facts of reality when it got beyond the limits of human endurance. She was stabilized by the Mexican woman's calmness and didn't protest when she asked permission to take baby Jonathan to her nearby village to visit her family. It was probably a good time for the baby to be out of the danger zone for a few days.

Dixie stripped down to her bloomers to take a bath in the big wooden tub her mama had insisted on carrying on the back of the wagon all the way from Saint Louis, Missouri and was not at all shy in front of Manuela or Running Eagle because they were like family now. Then, she sat down at the table and wrote a nice long letter to her mama's family all the way back in Boston, Massachusetts. She knew her grandfather was a factory owner and made the cloth for the suits her mother's sisters made up into fine men's formal clothing. They were not enthusiastic about their sister leaving for the wild, Wild West filled with dangerous outlaws and Indians with evil intent. Some tears fell from her eyes onto the paper splotching the ink as she related he circumstances of her mother's demise. She had watched her mother do the same thing when she wrote a letter the previous year about young Ned's accidental death.