Reno’s head lifted sharply. Eve’s words, rather than her body, finally had his full attention.

«You can read the old Spanish writings?» he asked.

«Don taught me how before his eyes got too bad to make out the words. I would read them to him, and he would try to remember what his father had said about those passages, and his grandfather, too.»

«Family tales. Fairy tales. Same difference.»

Eve ignored the interruption. «Then I’d write down what Don remembered in the journal’s margins.»

«Couldn’t he write?»

«Not for the past few years. His hands were too knotted up.»

Unconsciously Eve laced her own slender fingers together, remembering the pain the old couple suffered in cold weather. Donna’s hands had been little better than her husband’s.

«I guess they spent too many winters in gold camps where there was more whiskey than firewood,» she said huskily.

«All right, Eve Lyon. Keep talking.»

«My name isn’t Lyon. They were my employers, not my blood relatives.»

Reno had caught the change in Eve’s voice and the subtle tension in her body. He wondered if she was lying.

«Employers?» he asked.

«They…» Eve looked away.

Reno waited.

«They bought me off an orphan train in Denver five years ago,» she said in a low voice.

Even as Reno opened his mouth to make a sarcastic remark about the futility of tugging on his heartstrings with sad stories, he realized that Eve could easily be telling the truth. The Lyons could indeed have bought her from an orphan train as though she were a side of bacon.

It wouldn’t have been the first time such a thing had happened. Reno had heard many other such stories. Some of the orphans found good homes. Most didn’t. They were worked, and worked hard, by homesteaders or townspeople who had no cash to hire help, but had enough food to spare for another mouth.