Robin Lee Hatcher Read Online Free

remember. You wrote to me about it.”
    What he hadn’t told her in his letters was how near impossible it was to save anything from the meager wages he’d earned, how often he’d gone to bed hungry in that miserable room he’d rented, how more than once he’d wondered if he’d traveled all that way for nothing.
    “After I left New York, I found work on a farm in Pennsylvania, then I moved on to another farm in Ohio, and after that, I went to work in Minnesota.”
    “You liked it in Minnesota best of all.”
    He nodded, remembering the many nights he’d sat at that rickety table in the farmhand’s quarters, a candle flickering nearby, penning his letters to Karola. I’ll send for you soon, he’d written. He’d never meant for it to be a lie.
    “I worked hard, Karola, and I saved almost every dollar I earned so I could buy land, so I could have a farm of my own, be my own man, make my own way. I planned to stay in Minnesota. There were many German immigrants there. But then I met a man who told me about California. It sounded like heaven on earth, so I decided to see for myself.”
    This part was more difficult to tell. How he set out for the West in the spring of 1901, traveling by rail and on foot. How he was robbed of all his money and possessions, including the pocket watch that had been his grandfather’s, the one with her photograph inside. How the thieves had beaten him afterward and left him for dead.
    “Sweeney Gaffney and his daughter, Siobhan, found me lying on the side of the road.”
    Siobhan. Different from any woman Jakob had ever known. She’d been as strong as a man of equal size, and her Irish temper had been twice that of any man, large or small. Siobhan, with her red hair to match her fiery temper and a passion for life that burned bright and hot.
    Siobhan had been there to nurse him back to health. She’d been there to listen as he poured out his loneliness and despair. His dreams for a farm of his own seemed to have vanished forever, and with those dreams went his hope. He had failed. He would never have the things he’d once wanted.
    But Siobhan had lifted his spirits again, encouraged him, made him laugh, made him forget. The old country—as well as his old promises—had seemed distant, unreal, dreamlike. As had Karola. Siobhan, her good-natured father, and a hardscrabble farm in Wyoming—those were what were real.
    Jakob had been twenty-four and lusty; Siobhan had been twenty-two and willing. They’d got on well enough, and so they’d wed.
    Looking at him for the first time since they’d left American Falls, Karola asked, “Did you love Siobhan?” Her voice was barely audible above the creak of the wagon wheels.
    He hesitated only a moment before giving his answer. “Yes. Maybe at first I married her for other reasons, but I grew to love her.”
    Karola nodded, then looked away again.
    Jakob continued with the story, thinking it best to get it over and done with. “Maeve came along nine months after we married. Bernard ten months after that. Siobhan lost the next two.”
    His wife had mourned those babies with the same fervor with which she loved their two surviving children. Jakob had mourned them, too, in a private corner of his heart. The same year as the second miscarriage, things worsened for the family when the bank took possession of Sweeney Gaffney’s farm. They had been forced to pick up stakes and move to Shadow Creek, Idaho, where Sweeney’s brother, Tulley Gaffney, lived. Not long after they got to Idaho, Sweeney had died.
    Loss heaped upon loss heaped upon loss.
    “I borrowed money from Siobhan’s uncle to buy our farm. The soil is rich, and the crops were good those first two years. We paid off the loan the same day Siobhan discovered she was expecting another baby.”
    He hadn’t been happy at the news. He’d told Siobhan they were just getting their heads above water. For the first time in a long while, Jakob had felt real hope for the future. It