Tom Rainse sat up in his day-coach seat as the train began the long, switchback climb over Tanner’s Mountain. He peered eagerly through the smudged window. It seemed to him that he had left here only yesterday, instead of five years ago.
When the train reached the mountain’s top, he gazed down a long slope toward a clearing and a town in the bottom of a valley. The town was Hilldale. Five years ago, just after his father died, he had boarded the train there to join a wild stampede to western gold fields.
Tom leaned forward, narrowing his eyes and focusing them on the hillside pasture at the upper end of the town. Enclosed by barbed wire, half a hundred horses grazed in the sloping pasture. They were of all colors and weights, from heavy work beasts to lithe saddle stock. They seemed like
