Chapter 28As darkness fell, I left a lamp burning in the big house and sent everyone to the stone cabin for the night. The space was close and crowded, but I somehow felt more secure. Intruders would expect us to be in the main house. I saw to the comfort of my charges, including the little white baby flourishing in Rachel Ann’s care before throwing my blankets down on the porch in the deeper shadow of the overhang.
A long, anxious night passed slowly, ticking off its minutes and seconds quietly and deliberately. Despite the desperate craving for rest my battered body demanded, I could not sleep. My ears probed the great silence of the prairie for some harbinger of the trouble that was surely coming. Still, I must have slept because a shaft of sunlight woke me on the eastern-facing porch.
