Mostrando resultados por autor "C. J. Petit" en Todas las categorías

Will noticed that the numbers didn't add up when he was 11, but he didn't discover the truth of that mathematical problem until he was 17. For most of his young life, Will had known Pearl as his older sister, but only after the man who had acted as his father died did he learn that she was really his mother.

Joe and Faith were miles ahead of the long line of wagons as they ascended Cheyenne Pass. They knew that when they passed over the summit, the Laramie Plains would spread out before them. But just before they reached the top of the pass, Joe pulled up when he thought he heard gunfire. Just seconds later, he and Faith quickly rode to the summit where they witnessed what could only be called a massacre.

After he and Garth had built the A-G Connected, Al thought that he’d fulfilled his dream by owning a horse ranch. But when Garth announced that he was going to get married, Al knew that he would only be in the way, so he decided to find his own place. It was after he found his new ranch almost a hundred miles south of the A-G that things changed dramatically, and he realized that just starting a ranch and raising horses wasn’t a dream at all, and it would take a nightmare to discover what that dream truly was.

Mark Jordan was in no hurry to finish the long ride across Texas to reach his first assignment in Dallas. He was ashamed of himself for not standing up to his father and choosing his own career. But now, he was an ordained minister and wished something would happen to change the course of his life, unaware that the two riders who were approaching him from the west would soon do that and much more.

It hadn’t been a bad winter, but the townsfolk of Idaho City were anxious for spring to arrive. Like everyone else, Joe would appreciate the warmer weather and longer days. But he and Sheriff Fulmer both dreaded the influx of gold hunters and the trouble they would bring. They needed more good men, but after losing two deputies, not a single acceptable candidate had applied.

Before the wagons left the Laramie Plains, a quiet epidemic began infecting some of the settlers. It was a disease without a cure and threatened to create havoc among the families. It started as just a passing remark, but soon word of a recent discovery surrounding Idaho City, just three hundred miles away inspired intense gold rush fever in many of the men. The first to become infected was Joe’s fellow scout, Chuck Lynch.

TJ knew the coal was there. A large deposit. But he had seen something else that intrigued him about the area south of Gillette in Wyoming Territory. He would find it only after he had bought the huge tract from the railroad. And he found much more. Not all of it good.

Bethan listened as her father explained to her mother the mission that he was giving to her brother, Lynn, and her Uncle Bryn. After she’s heard all of the details, she left the big house and returned to her small house where she began to pack. She was frustrated at being unable to apply the skills that she’d been learning from her father since she was just a young girl, knowing that if she’d been born male, she would have been sworn in as a deputy marshal within a year.

The loud roar snapped Mrs. Doyle from her sleep, and she quickly slid from her bedroll, stepped to the tents flap, and pulled it aside seeing a bear standing on its hind legs just a few feet from her. What made it more horrifying was what she didn't see. The camp behind the bear was empty. She dropped the flap and turned to her the frightened boy standing behind her. He looked at his equally terrified nanny unaware that they had been abandoned to die in the wilderness.

Mack Smith had left his shop in Pueblo and was just an hour or so from reaching his brother’s ranch for his annual visit when he felt the bullet slam into his head, and when his eyes finally opened, he found himself flat on his back on the bottom of a ravine. What the hell had happened? He was only a gunsmith, not a gunfighter.

In his haste to escape a scalding death, the engine operator panicked and fell. Dylan lifted his heavy shovel as high as his 12-year-old arms could manage and swung at the thundering machine. It could've killed him, but he had to try. As the shovel’s steel head slammed into the machine, it set in motion a series of events that would shape his entire life.

Joe had been the last child chosen. An entire trainload of children heading west had already been chosen, including his sister and his two friends. They had been the final four children on the train and made a pact to meet 10 years later when they were all adults. The 10 years were over. Joe would finally be reunited with his sister and his friends, including his girlfriend when he was 11.

Clay County Sheriff Rusty Price had been following the two killers since they galloped out of his town but kept out of sight until the sun set. In the low light, he closed the gap and planned to wait until they crawled into their bedrolls to take them down.

Yavapai County in Arizona Territory was bigger than Pennsylvania, and Sheriff Sam Hicks and his three deputies were the only law that most of its residents knew. When China Joe’s gang knocked off the huge cash shipment heading for Prescott, Sheriff Hicks left his office unsure if this would be his last job one way or the other. He knew he had to retire soon, he didn’t expect to be alive in six months, whether it was from a .44 or his failing heart.

After finally crossing the South Platte River, the wagon train headed north toward Lodge Pole Cree where they expected to find another set of ruts leading west to Oregon. As he and Faith led their tent-cart away from Julesburg, Joe wondered if he wasn’t defying fate by leaving Colorado behind. The magnetic attraction that had pulled him south hadn’t diminished. But he still felt an obligation to the folks, even those who would never consider him a friend.

The upcoming eclipse was anxiously awaited by Clay Jeffries as he prepared a private observatory on the plateau above his father's ranch near Rawlins in Wyoming territory. Then, he received a visitor with an unusual request. The stranger asked the ex-professor if he would tutor his frumpy but brilliant daughter in astronomy. Clay reluctantly agreed, but only if she proved to be an exceptional student. While the young girl surely proved to be both brilliant and frumpy, her arrival also brought with it many potentially deadly consequences that neither she nor her father realized.

As Dylan talked to Gwen, he told her how he felt that some of the more important stories of the first two generations needed to be passed on to the younger Evans.

Morgan was meeting with an important client in his well-appointed law office in San Antonio when his clerk tapped on the door and entered without waiting for a reply. Morgan didn’t mind as he expected Jim Cooper had a good reason for the interruption.

The days of unrelenting rain had kept the wagon train from moving for almost a week, and the folks were getting frustrated and angry. So, rather than try to cross the swollen Platte River, the wagon master had them rolling southwest hoping to cross when its level dropped. As Joe and Faith led their tent-cart ahead of the lead wagon, they didn’t allow the foul weather to affect their good mood. But it wasn’t Mother Nature who would soon cause them grief.

As Carl sat astride his roan gelding and stared at Pine Bluffs, he knew that his days of punching cattle were over. The long drives across the West were dying now that the railroads had crisscrossed the Plains. Ironically, his last formal education had given him the skills and knowledge to help build those railroads, and now he’d finally put them to use. His short-term plan of spending a quiet night or two in Pine Bluffs would soon be altered by a simmering man-made volcano in the mountains of central Wyoming at a mine that provided the coal for the railroad’s locomotives.