This book is for Eva C. Whitley, so loving a completist that she not only has all my writings, but she married me, too.

The shadow of death passed through Cornwall, Nebraska, but it was such a nice day that nobody noticed.

The sign off Interstate 80 simply read “Cornwall, next left,” and left it at that. If you took it you were immediately taken onto a smaller and rougher road that looked as if it had last been maintained in the days of the Coolidge administration. Avoiding the potholes and hoping that your own vehicle wasn’t too wide to pass the one coming toward you, you finally passed a small steak house and bar and were told by a smaller sign that you were in Cornwall, Nebraska, Town of the Pioneers, population 1160, together with the news that not only did they have Lions and Rotary, but when they met as well.

The town itself was little more than a main street composed of a few shops and stores, an old church, the inevitable prairie museum, and a motel which had never seen better days, as much maintained by pride as by business.

There wasn’t very much business in Cornwall; like thousands of others throughout the great plains states the town existed as a center for the farmers to get supplies and feed, and to order whatever else they needed from the local Montgomery Ward’s or Sears catalog store.

It was stifling hot on this mid-July afternoon. The ancestors of these people had settled in inhospitable Nebraska because they had lost hope of Oregon; trapped with all their worldly possessions, they had made the land here work—but they had never tamed it.

Three blocks down a side street, a woman gave a terrified shriek and ran from her front door out onto the sidewalk, down toward the stores as fast as she could. Rounding the corner, she ran into the small five-and-ten and screamed at a man checking stock on one of the shelves.