Prairie Rose
A Town Called Hope • Book 1
CATHERINE
PALMER
TYNDALE HOUSE PUBLISHERS, INC.
CAROL STREAM, ILLINOIS
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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 author’s 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'.54—dc21 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 Lord—rejoice 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 God’s very own children, adopted into his family—calling him “Father, dear Father.” For his Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we are God’s 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 first—a dark-haired fellow in a chambray shirt and black suspenders—minded 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 you’re doing?”
“Give me the boy, or I’ll shoot again!” Cornwall hollered back.
“He’s my son.”
“You stole him!”
“He’s 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 for—slave labor?”
“You forgetting I’m a Union man, Cornwall? We don’t trade in human flesh like you Rebs.”
“And we don’t 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 couldn’t 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 didn’t know which of the men was in the right, but she wasn’t 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.