A Claim of Her Own Read Free

before long she’d snuggled down and fallen asleep.

    Hands on hips, Swede stood just inside the huge tent that would become her temporary store and surveyed the growing piles of boxes and bolts of cloth around her. Her real name was Katerina, but everyone called her Swede, and that was fine with her. It had not always been so. At first she had resented it. After all, what if she was so tall and as strong as most men? Did that mean she must have a man’s name? Swede sounded so rough. But then she’d met Garth Jannike. He said she was “statuesque.” He was glad for her strength. He called her Katerina and treated her with such tenderness that even though she was now beginning her second year of life without him, Swede’s eyes still filled with tears when she thought about him. Which was why she allowed herself such moments only when she was alone. And alone you are not. You have freight to handle and Mattie O’Keefe to help and a store to build and— She swiped at her cheek with the back of one hand and bent to open a box.
    It was seeing Freddie again that had done it, Swede realized. Every time she returned to the gulch with a load of goods, at the first glimpse of Freddie there was always that second of thinking about Garth, and with it the longing to fill the empty place in her heart. Strange how the first sight of Freddie always reminded her of Garth. Freddie wasn’t even Garth’s child. Strange how the adopted child had grown to be so like the man who’d taken him in and loved him as his own.
    Like Garth, Freddie was tall, with shoulder-length blond hair and eyes the color of the indigo sky just when the sun had set and the last of the golden light was slipping away. He was handsome, too, in a way that made women sometimes stop and stare—until they noticed the different way Freddie carried himself, the slight shuffle in his gait, the slowness of speech. He hadn’t been born that way. A high fever had done this to him, destroying not only Katerina’s dreams for her child but also her first marriage. Freddie’s father had left both the “damaged” child and his seventeen-year-old bride soon after the sickness passed.
    But God was good. He had brought Garth Jannike into their lives when Freddie was only two years old, and with Garth came love and a future and a hope—just as the Bible promised.
    Sometimes when it was late at night and Swede could not sleep because of worry or sadness, she would think on how God had brought Garth into her life just when she was most desperate. And she would tell herself to be strong, for desperation was for those who had no God. If she could last through another season of bullwhacking and freighting, good families might come to Deadwood. And if they did not come and there was no plan for a church and school, then Katerina Jannike would take her Freddie and little Eva and leave this place and they would find a home somewhere else.
    As she lifted a pair of men’s rubber boots out of the open box before her, Swede reached up to touch the bag of gold dust around her neck. She smiled. Ven you sell all of dis freight you vill have even more gold. Even now you can take care of your children, vich is more dan many do. Swede sighed as she looked around her. So much work yet to do. Oxen to tend, boxes to open, merchandise to arrange . . . Ah, but she felt old. So much older than her thirty-three years.
    Freddie ducked into the tent with another box. “Three more stores opened while you were gone, Mor,” he said, and set the box down in the far corner.
    “Tree?”
    Freddie nodded.
    Swede clucked her tongue and shook her head. Three freighting contracts she had missed by being gone. So much business lost to someone else. She could almost feel the hot breath of doubt whispering in her ear. You’ll never have a real store. You’ll never save enough to have a real home again. She distracted herself from her doubt by bustling outside and yelling at a lanky passerby, “You dere! Get