I rose with the dawn from my solitary bed. A two hundred forty-acre farm demanded more than I could give now my cattle operation had grown. I’d always been a farmer with cows. Nowadays, I was leaning toward a cowman with a farm.
Arrow Wind, my buckskin war horse, snorted as I turned him and the black trace mare into the corral. I bypassed the smithy on the way to the fields. My eighty acres of sweet corn were already spinning silk. Wheat and vegetables took up the rest of the tilled land. Wheat, my money crop. Corn for the cattle. Vegetables and a bit of corn for Matthew and me. And for trading.
Beyond the fields to the west, I held fee title to another hundred acres, most of which were behind a Pennsylvania worm fence, a zigzag affair of stacked poles and brush. My hundred fifty head of
