Stephanie Grace Whitson - [Quilt Chronicles] Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the back at Goldie’s, cooking and mending. Sadie upstairs as Simone LaBelle. And Cass, holding on to his faith, working hard for Sterling Sutton, saving every penny, investing with the boss’s help, hoping to lure Sadie away from the life she’d taken on after Cass had run away from home and she and Ma had faced hard times.
    His culpability in it all haunted him. He’d lost track of them after running off, and that was entirely his fault. He hadn’t written home. Not once. He was too afraid of being found out and hauled back to more abuse at the hands of his stepfather.
    He’d told the Union Army he was eighteen and gotten away with it, thanks to his height and the years of hard labor that had roughened his large hands. Then, just weeks after he left, his stepfather had died at the hands of Quantrill’s raiders. Ma took Sadie and moved to Kansas City, and when Cass came home, no one knew where they’d gone.
    Fate brought them together again in Nebraska. At least that’s what he’d called it at first. Now he knew God had a hand in it.
    He glanced toward the Russian Bottoms and thought about Ludwig Meyer’s “little house,” and the way the man looked at Sadie. What did it mean?
    A train whistle broke the quiet. Cass started. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he headed on into the warehouse district, to the sprawling combination office-warehouse-lumberyard that belonged to Sterling Sutton. He tried to pray while he walked. He asked comfort for the Sutton women. He prayed about the girl who’d died in the fire and asked God to give Pastor Taylor and Reverend Burnham wisdom, for they would both likely be called on today to visit the boss’s house. Miss Lydia Sutton attended St. John’s, where she was so beloved that everyone, including Cass, called her
Aunt Lydia.
The rest of the Suttons were at First Church with Reverend Burnham. As he finished his prayer, Cass asked for help to do a good job for Mrs. Sutton. Starting right now.
    Half-a-dozen men were already waiting outside the office, smoking and talking. At first sight of Cass, they squelched their cigars and began asking questions. He answered what he could as he unlocked the door. Yes, the boss was dead. No, he didn’t know what would happen to the company—whether Mrs. Sutton would keep it or sell it.
    “Does she even own it?” one of the men asked. “Did he have a will?”
    “I have no idea, but until someone with the authority to do it tells us to stop, we’ll keep working.” He led the way through the front office and toward the back lot, pausing to grab the day’s work order off the nail by the door. Once in the lumberyard, he waited for the men to gather around again, calling out who would hitch up the teams while the others loaded materials.
    The assignments given, Cass turned to go, but one of the men asked, “That’s an awful big place we’re building. You think she’ll move into it all by herself? Just her and those two old ladies?”
    It was a fair question. Cass had already wondered about that himself. The new Sutton mansion was the talk of Lincoln—not all of it admiring. The boss had bragged that it would be one of the finest houses west of the Missouri. Cass had thought he might be exaggerating—until he saw the plans. What would a new widow and two maiden aunts do with all those rooms?
    “As I said before, all I know is that we have work to do, and we’ll go about doing it until someone in authority tells us to stop or we run out of materials.”
    Jessup folded his arms across his broad chest. “No disrespect intended, but if I’m to be out of a job in the near future, I’d like to know so I can be looking for something else. I’ve a family to feed.”
    A chorus of new questions rose in the wake of Jessup’s comment. Cass hesitated only a moment before inspiration struck. He held up his hand for quiet. “I’ll tell you what. You men load the wagons and head out to the job site just like any other day, and I’ll