Read Online Chasing the Sun by Kaki Warner - Free Book Online

cleared the cargo, picked up some cash from his San Francisco bank, then hurried to the train depot. Figuring it would be better for his broken foot to sit rather than ride over twelve hundred miles by horseback, he sold his horse and tack to a disembarking passenger, then went inside to buy a ticket.
    He wasn’t sure how close to the ranch he could get before having to either take a coach or buy another horse. When he’d left New Mexico three years ago, the southern route of the transcontinental wasn’t even finished. Now, as he studied the giant railroad map painted across the back wall of the depot, he could see that dozens of intersecting lines and spurs and branches had sprung up in his absence. Even more surprising was the notation above a twenty-mile stretch of track that snaked down from the main line southeast of Santa Fe to a small town named Redemption. The notation read, “Wilkins Cattle and Mining.”
    Mining? When had they gotten into mining? And mining what?
    His second shock came a moment later when upon closer examination of the map he saw that Redemption was located well within the northwest corner of Wilkins land.
    Mines, a rail spur, and their own town too?
    We must be rich, Jack thought with a grin. Apparently his brothers had been busy in his absence.
    After purchasing a ticket on the eastbound departing that afternoon—which actually followed the coast south for four hundred miles before turning east—he hobbled over to a small cantina behind the depot, where he ordered a celebratory drink and a plate of frijoles.
    Wilkins Cattle and Mining. He liked the sound of that. The previous name—RosaRoja Rancho—was past history, too reminiscent of the feud between his family and Elena’s and all the lives that had been lost because of it. Besides, the roses it had been named for were gone. After Elena’s brother, Sancho, set the ranch afire, most of the roses their mother had planted around the foundation of the house in honor of his birth had been charred to cinders along with everything else.
    He wondered if his brothers had rebuilt the house yet. He hoped they hadn’t just copied the original. He hated the sprawling hacienda the Ramirez family had built so many years ago. All adobe and tile and dark carved wood, it had been a constant reminder of Elena’s lost heritage and the bloodshed that had followed. He’d always felt like an intruder in someone else’s home.
    The train arrived only five hours late, and by the time he’d hobbled on board and settled in a window seat on the shady side of the passenger car, they were heading out of the depot.
    The miles clickety-clacked by at an astounding pace. Jack had never moved so fast on land or sea, and if the train hadn’t lost a half hour out of every two hours stopping to fill the water tank on the tender, they could have made over three hundred miles in a day. A stupefying achievement.
    But boring.
    Luckily he was able to relieve the tedium for the first couple of days by joining a rolling low-stakes poker game in the mail and baggage car. But at Yuma, after losing two players when the Deputy United States Marshal and his prisoner disembarked, the other fellows called it quits.
    After that he mostly slept or took bets on how many jackrabbits he could shoot with his Sharps .50 as the train sped by. Having seen the damage rabbits had done in both Tasmania and parts of Australia, he had no great fondness for the little pests. But shooting them was harder than it looked—trying to hit a moving target from a bouncing platform while balanced on a crutch—and it wasn’t long before he’d lost almost everything he’d won in the poker game and had run out of bullets. He’d never been that good a shot.
    By the morning of the fifth day he was ready to get out and crawl the rest of the way to the ranch when they finally chugged into Redemption. Wilkins land at last. With a deep sigh of relief, he limped off the rear step onto the depot platform and