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while he conducted business. Jade stood in the shade of the canopied walkway and watched as he pulled up outside the mercantile and went inside.
    ‘Miss Armstrong. I see you’ve regained your fashion sense.’
    Startled, she turned to see Sheriff Garth Weston lean against the doorframe, an open newspaper in his hands. A burly man in his late forties, he had been the sheriff of Mariposa County as long as Jade could remember. He made a show of studying her neat upsweep and cotton dress with amused gray eyes.
    ‘I…’ Not knowing how to respond, she offered him a weak smile.
    A ruckus outside the saloon made them whirl around. Two men were rolling in the dust. The sheriff shoved the newspaper he’d been reading into her hands and hurried out to break up the brawl. Jade skimmed the pages while she waited for Carl to emerge from the mercantile.
    Her eyes fell on a boxed advertisement placed by the stage line. They were looking for men. Drivers. Guards. The stage line did have jobs, and yet Carl had come back to her. She pressed a hand to her heart as a wild burst of joy leaped within her.
    The faint jingle of a bell down the street drew her attention. Carl clattered down the steps, hauled a box of peaches to his chest and carried it through the mercantile door. A few moments later, he came back for another. Jade exhaled a sigh of relief.
    ‘Jade Armstrong,’ a melodic voice called out, pulling her from her thoughts.
    ‘Victoria? Victoria Sinclair?’ She stared at the dark, willowy girl who walked up dressed in a peacock blue gown and twirling a matching parasol.
    ‘The one and only.’ The girl turned in a slow circle, raising one gloved hand to adjust the bonnet perched on top of her elegant upsweep. ‘So, what do you think?’ she asked, glancing back over her shoulder. ‘Did they make a lady out of me?’
    ‘You were always a lady,’ Jade replied. Victoria’s father, Andrew Sinclair, owned one of the biggest ranches in the county. Two years earlier, Victoria had gone away to an academy for young ladies in Boston. They’d been friends at school…but things might be different now.
    Jade took a deep breath. ‘I guess you haven’t heard—’
    Victoria’s blue eyes sparkled. ‘About the eagle feathers and buckskins, and going to live in a wickiup?’
    Blushing, Jade nodded.
    ‘Of course I have, even though I only arrived two days ago.’ Victoria closed her parasol and used it to give Jade a friendly swipe on the arm. ‘You rotten egg. Why didn’t you wait until I was back? I’d have come with you. Not to stay, of course,’ she added hastily. ‘It’s heaven to be home again, but I’d have joined you for a few days.’
    ‘Your father would have killed you.’
    Victoria huffed. ‘Never. I would have told him it’s an anthropological study. He couldn’t have argued back because he’d have been too embarrassed to admit he didn’t know the meaning of the word.’ Her mouth tilted into a playful smile. ‘I might only have been back two days, but my father is cursing every cent he spent on that fancy school. He says it’s turned me into an unbearable creature.’ Deepening her voice and pointing her parasol toward the sky, she stabbed the air and chanted, ‘Let women have the vote! End the oppression!’
    ‘You’ve become a suffragette?’
    ‘No, but pretending is one of the ways I’m paying my father back for banishing me for two years. I’d rather have gone to Yuma prison.’
    As they continued talking, Jade noticed people giving them curious glances. Hope rose inside her. Victoria was a rebel, but she was the daughter of an influential man. Perhaps with Victoria’s support, her campaign to make people accept her again had some slight chance of success.
    * * *
    Shirtless, his skin glistening with sweat, a bandanna tied around his tousled hair, Carl strode up the porch steps and paused by the open cabin door. He’d been building a lean-to shed behind the barn, planning to fill it with chopped