Catherine Palmer - Prairie Rose

A Town Called Hope Book 1

CATHERINE
PALMER

TYNDALE HOUSE PUBLISHERS, INC.
CAROL STREAM, ILLINOIS

Visit Tyndales exciting Web site at www.tyndale.com

TYNDALE and Tyndales quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Prairie Rose

Copyright 1997 by Catherine Palmer. All rights reserved.

Cover photograph of wood panel copyright by Getty Images. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration copyright 2004 by Robert Hunt. All rights reserved.

Designed by Rule 29

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible , King James Version.

Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible , New Living Translation, copyright 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Palmer, Catherine, date Prairie Rose / Catherine Palmer.

p. cm. (A town called hope ; #1)

ISBN 0-8423-7056-0 (pbk.)

I. Title II. Series: Palmer, Catherine, date. Town called hope ; #1.

PS3566.A495P7 1997

813'.54dc21 97-23018

New repackage first published in 2009 under ISBN 978-1-4143-3157-7.

Printed in the United States of America

15 14 13 12 11 10 09

7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my husband ,
Timothy Charles Palmer .
Twenty years of promises kept .
I love you .

His name is the Lordrejoice in his presence! Father to the fatherless God places the lonely in families . Psalm 68:4-6, NLT

So you should not be like cowering, fearful slaves. You should behave instead like Gods very own children, adopted into his familycalling him Father, dear Father. For his Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we are Gods children . Romans 8:15-16, NLT

Contents

Kansas City, Missouri
May 1865

T ALKING to God from the outstretched limb of a towering white oak tree had its advantages. For one thing, it meant that Rosie Mills could see beyond the confining walls of the Christian Home for Orphans and Foundlings, where she had lived all nineteen years of her life. For another, she had always felt as if she were closer to God up in the old tree. That was kind of silly, Rosie knew. God had lived in her heart ever since she gave it to him one night at a tent preaching service, just before the War Between the States. But the best thing about praying in the oak tree was the constantly changing scene that unfolded below.

Take these two men coming her way. The firsta dark-haired fellow in a chambray shirt and black suspendersminded his own business as he drove his wagon down the dusty street. He had a little boy beside him on the seat and a load of seed in the wagon bed. The other man followed on a black horse. All the time Rosie had been praying, she had been watching the second fellow edge closer and closer, until finally he was right behind the wagon.

Seth Hunter! the horseman shouted, pulling a double-barreled shotgun from the scabbard on his saddle. Stop your mules and put your hands in the air.

The command was so loud and the gun so unexpected that Rosie nearly lost her precarious perch on the old limb. The milkman across the street straightened up and stared. Down the way, the vegetable seller and his son halted in their tracks.

I said, stop your team! the horseman bellowed.

The man on the wagon swung around and eyed his challenger. Jack Cornwall, he spat. I might have known.

He gave the reins a sharp snap to set his mules racing lickety-split down the road. Jack Cornwall cocked his shotgun, lifted it to his shoulder, aimed it at the fleeing wagon, and fired. At the blast, Rosie gave a strangled scream. A puff of pungent gray smoke blossomed in the air. A hundred tiny lead pellets smashed into the seed barrels on the back of the wagon. Wood splintered. Seeds spilled across the road. The mules brayed and faltered, jerking the wagon from side to side.

Whoa, whoa! the driver of the wagon shouted. Cornwall, what in thunder do you think youre doing?

Give me the boy, or Ill shoot again! Cornwall hollered back.

Hes my son.

You stole him!

Hes mine by rights. The wagon rolled to a halt directly beneath the oak tree where Rosie perched. I aim to take him to my homestead, and neither you nor anybody else is going to stop me, hear?

What do you want him forslave labor?

You forgetting Im a Union man, Cornwall? We dont trade in human flesh like you Rebs.

And we dont go stealing children out from under the noses of the grandparents who took care of them since the day they were born.

My wife took care of Chipper

Wife? the man exploded. He edged his horse forward, once again leveling his shotgun at Hunter. You claiming my sister would marry some good-for-nothing farmhand?

Rosie gripped the oak branch. The two men were barely three feet beneath her, and she could almost feel the heat of their hatred. This was terrible. The little boy the men were arguing about was hunkered down in the wagon, terrified. He couldnt have been more than five or six years old, and as he peered over the wooden seat his big blue eyes filled with tears.

Rosie didnt know which of the men was in the right, but she wasnt about to let this Jack Cornwall fellow shoot someone. She spotted a stout stick caught in a fork of the tree. Maybe she could use it to distract the men, she thought as she shinnied toward the slender end of her branch.

Your sister married me, whether you believe it or not, Seth Hunter snarled. Im this boys father, and I mean to take him with me.

I didnt track your worthless hide all the way to Kansas City to let you just ride off to the prairie with my nephew. No sir, Chippers going south with me. My pappys not about to let you work his grandson to the bone on your sorry excuse for a farm.

I told you I dont plan on working him. In fact, Im headed for this orphanage right now to hire me a hand.

Hire you a hand, Jack scoffed. He spat a long stream of brown tobacco juice onto the dirt road. Whatre you aiming to pay him withgrasshoppers? Thats all youre going to be growing on your homestead, Hunter. Grasshoppers, potato bugs, and boll weevils.

Ive got a house and a barn, Jack. Thats more than a lot of folks can say, including you. And any youngun would gladly trade that orphanage for a home.

I would , Rosie thought. She was beginning to side with Seth Hunter, even if he had stolen the little boy. The other man was big, rawboned, and mean-tempered. For all she knew he planned to shoot Seth dead with his shotgun. And right in front of the child!

The branch she was straddling bobbed a little from her weight as she inched along it toward the stick. Truth to tell, it was the boy who stirred her heart the most. Neither man had even bothered to ask the child what he wanted to do. And where on earth was the poor little fellows mother?