Renegade Most Wanted - By Carol Arens Page 0,1

find that we must move on in haste. Our wonderful homestead, a pure piece of paradise, will be free for the taking. We know how you yearn for a home of your own. Time is not on your side, dear. Catch the first train to Dodge before some other lucky soul files on it. May your future return to you all the joy and kindness that you have shown to our children over the years. Please do come quickly. Edna Harkins.’”

So far she had been lucky. The former Harkins place had not been filed on. It was destined to be hers, even if she had to flirt with every last bachelor in Dodge to get it.

Emma watched a prospective groom rumble down the earthen street in his wagon. Her loveliest smile earned no more than a raised hat when he rolled past. Drat if the jingle of his harness didn’t sound as if it was laughing at her.

This rough splintered bench should have been the perfect spot to catch a man. She couldn’t imagine what she was doing wrong. Weren’t the men of the west desperate for helpful mates? She’d always heard that was true, but her efforts at appearing irresistible seemed to be falling flat.

She’d bet a pretty penny that the man in the wagon would have no trouble at all filing a claim. His gender alone would make it a simple thing.

Pinpricks of irritation plucked at her patience. She wouldn’t even need a husband if the politicians who had passed the Homestead Act had been more open-minded about the rules. Even the clerk in the land office acted as if he had written them himself, the way he stuck to the very letter of the law.

Earlier this morning she had explained until her voice had grown hoarse that she was an orphan and no one knew her true age.

“The law says you’ve got to be twenty-one or head of a household. Even if guessing were allowed, you don’t look to be more than twenty.” The clerk scratched the lower of his double chins and wagged his finger at her. “Besides, I don’t see what a pretty little thing like you is going to do with all that land. No sir, it doesn’t seem safe or proper.”

And when had her life ever been safe or proper? The homestead was the one thing that would give her that. On her own land she’d put down deep roots where life’s whims couldn’t blow her about.

“As you’ll recall,” Emma had said, gathering her patience, “I do have—”

“Don’t tell me again that your blind horse qualifies you to be head of a household. You’ve got to have a young’un for that.”

That male-thinking nonsense curdled her stomach.

Since adopting a young’un was the very last thing she intended to do, she was stuck with finding a head of the household to file her claim for her. Anyone still breathing would do. After all, they would be married only the few moments it would take the gent to file her claim. The lucky man would then walk away ten dollars richer.

Heavy boot thumps drummed the wooden sidewalk. Emma twirled her dainty satin parasol and glanced to her left with a wide blink and a smile that felt like yesterday’s flowers.

A tall man, a dandy by the looks of him, blew a ring of cigarette smoke into the fleeting afternoon. He strode past her with his back stiff and his polished boots reflecting arrows of sunlight.

The stench of stale cologne and nicotine trailed behind him long after he disappeared through the land-office doors.

What if the stick-to-the-letter-of-the-law clerk issued the dandified gent the claim to the homestead that she had traveled hundreds of miles by clackety, bone-jarring train to stake as her own? Her mind saw the transaction occurring as clearly as if the building had no walls.

Emma groaned, then glanced across the street through a gap between a pair of buildings. The sun had already begun its long red slide toward a horizon that looked like the end of the earth itself.

Somewhere on that flat, golden prairie was her new home. She intended to sleep there tonight, to listen to the wind blow over her very own grass. In the morning she would wake to a chorus of birds singing about her shining new future.

Emma redoubled her efforts to attract the attention of a farmer crossing the street only a few yards from where she sat. He stepped into the mercantile without so much as a tipped