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have seen what was happening.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “I’m going to Wolf’s Landing, just as I planned, and check into it.”
    Jake knew he was repeating himself, and that it wasn’t a solution. But beyond that, he hadn’t a clue. How did one rebuild destroyed lives?

Chapter 2
    Wolf’s Landing, 1885
    LIGHTNING SLASHED THE SKY; THEN THUNDER clapped. Indigo Wolf settled herself on a patch of grass and looped her arms around her knees. With a cleansing sigh, she leaned back to catch the rain on her tongue. Water streamed from the brim of her leather hat down the nape of her neck. She shivered and straightened her spine. Somewhere above her on the hillside, lightning struck. A tree, split asunder by its force, gave a loud pop and crashed to the ground. The rumbling vibration and the smell of scorched pine reached to where she sat.
    Her pet wolf, Lobo, whined and pressed closer to her thigh. Buffeted by the wind, she placed a hand on his rain-soaked ruff and closed her eyes to absorb the electrical rage that eddied in the air. For a moment, she didn’t feel quite so impotent against the forces that threatened to tear her life apart.
    Today had been one of the longest she remembered. Every minute she had spent up at the mine had seemed like an eternity, her thoughts centered on home and what might be happening there. Now that she had finished work for the day, here she sat, afraid to find out.
    She wished the storm could last forever, but within a few minutes, the thunder grew more distant, and the rain began to abate. She opened her eyes to see that the blackest of the clouds were moving south. An anemic ray of sunshine shafted through the gloom, then blinked out. Her father would say the glimmer of light was a promise from the Great Ones that all would be well. Indigo lacked his faith. Things weren’t going to get better unless she fixed them herself. The question was, how?
    She sighed and pushed to her feet, gazing somberly at the settlement that clustered below her. Home. The word probably conjured different images for different people; for her, home meant Wolf’s Landing. A few more dwellings had gone up over the years, but otherwise the town looked the same. The sprawling house that her father had built after coming to Oregon over twenty years ago had held up well, its log walls seasoned to burnished umber, its patched roof a confused checkerboard of weathered gray and blond shakes. From her vantage point, she could see her ma’s chicken house and garden spot out back. Farther into the trees stood her father’s lodge, the cone of leather honey-brown with age, its poles crisscrossed among the lofty pines. Out by the woodpile was the scarred stump she and her brother, Chase, used as a practice target for their knife and axe throwing.
    Indigo couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Yet, right now, her father might be signing the papers that could change her life forever. If he hadn’t already. Ore-Cal Enterprises. She had first heard the name only a month ago, and already she hated it.
    Feeble strings of gray smoke drifted skyward from the town’s many chimneys and canted southward with the wind. She turned her gaze in that direction, filled with dread because she knew a different world lay beyond those distant snowcapped peaks. Here, only a snobbish few looked at the color of her skin and found her lacking. In the digs, no one tried to restrict her because she was female. If her father followed through with his plan to sell his mine, the life she had always known might be snatched away. In all her nineteen years, she had ventured no farther away than Jacksonville, a distance of ten miles.
    Selling the mine wasn’t necessary, but thus far she had been unable to convince her parents of that. She could get things running again and manage alone until her father recovered. She knew she could. If a bunch of narrow-minded people were bent on closing them down, let them do their worst. She could battle