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thick, squat body.
    “Chief, you okay?” Shorty spoke in low tones so the others couldn’t hear. “You feeling sick?”
    Ancient Eyes shrugged and shook his head no, sending his coarse shoulder-length white hair swinging around his dark, wrinkled face. He looked Shorty in the eye and admitted, “For one split second it was as if’—he lifted a broad hand and gestured toward the clear blue sky—“as if old friends from spirit world were warning me this trip not be good. Something bad happen.”
    Shorty neither laughed nor made light of the old chief’s superstitions. He asked gently, “You mean the show’s upcoming engagement in Denver?”
    Ancient Eyes again shook his head. “No. Mean this hunt we go on up in Shining Mountains.”
    Before Shorty could respond, the loading doors slammed shut behind them, the signal was given, and Boz, the engineer, pumped up the train’s engine again. And the eager Cherokee Kid, standing in the stirrups atop his chestnut stallion, shouted loudly, “What are we waitin’ for? Let’s go get us a big cat!”
    He lowered himself into the silver-trimmed saddle, dug his sharp roweled spurs into his mount’s belly, and the responsive chestnut shot away. The train slowly began to pick up speed. The rowdy Leatherwoods galloped after the Cherokee Kid, whooping and hollering. Shorty and Ancient Eyes exchanged looks of disgust, then set out after the younger riders.
    In the lead the Cherokee Kid raced across the plain, his horse’s hooves kicking up dust and flinging clumps of grass. He rode directly toward the towering Rockies.
    The riders would not be stopping in the city. It was three days until the show’s first scheduled Denver performance. While the troupe spent that time pitching the tents and erecting the grandstands and doing a dress run-through, the five who had left the train early were to spend those days camped in the high country west of Denver. Their mission: to find a mountain lion for the show. Always eager to gain the Colonel’s approval, the Cherokee Kid had promised the old showman that they wouldn’t come down from the hills until they had trapped a prize specimen.
    He meant to keep that promise.
    So the horsemen thundered swiftly toward the foothills as the much slower show train steamed steadily toward the outskirts of Denver.
    *   *   *  
    On the platform outside Denver’s newly refurbished Union Depot, Diane Buchannan squinted into the brilliant sunlight on that warm August afternoon. She was both comfortable and striking in a crisp white piqué frock and wide-brimmed straw hat, a violet silk scarf tied around its crown, the ends fluttering in the slight breeze stirring from the north.
    On her slender hands were violet cotton gloves, and above her head to shade her face and pale white shoulders from the fierce alpine sun was a dainty silk parasol of the same hue. Diane anxiously looked down the tracks for the train, which was due at the station any minute. She had been looking down those tracks for the past half hour.
    That, and pacing restlessly back and forth on the nearly deserted depot platform. She could hardly wait to see the Colonel and Granny Buchannan. Could hardly wait to see the look on the Colonel’s face when he stepped down from the train and found her waiting.
    Diane smiled, anticipating the moment.
    She hadn’t wired her grandparents that she was meeting them in Denver, hadn’t informed them that she was joining the troupe. It was to be a total surprise and she wasn’t at all certain how the Colonel would take the news. The fiery old man might be downright furious that his upstart granddaughter would deign to think he needed her to help bail him out of his financial woes.
    The Colonel was and always had been an extremely proud man. His adventurous life had been one of which legends are made. An Arizona native, Buck Buchannan had been an Indian fighter, a scout for the Army, a Civil War soldier with medals of bravery decorating his