LITMIR.BIZ

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subject of your dreams.”

      “I believe that dreams come to warn us, but that if we learn to heed them, we can change the course of events.”

      She heard the other man sniggering. “Did your dreams warn you about your father’s death, Miss Gordon?” the lieutenant asked, mocking her.

      “Dreams do not always tell us what we might most wish to know,” she said.

      “Tell me, Miss Gordon, have you ever changed the outcome of events after you dreamed them?”

      “Yes. I … stopped a young man who was wounded from rejoining his unit. I had seen him lying on the battlefield, staring up at the sky with sightless eyes on the battlefield. He has since been reassigned to communications work.”

      “Spying!” Lieutenant Green said.

      She laughed. “He was a Union soldier, so …”

      The quiet man spoke again. “What if we are not intended to change fate,” the soft-spoken man said.

      “We are creatures of free will,” she said. “I believe that God helps those who help themselves. We read books. Perhaps we can learn to read our dreams, as well,” she said.

      “Perhaps.” She heard him move his chair back. “It’s my belief, Lieutenant Green, that we are violating the rights of this young woman,” he said.

      She didn’t know what she had said, but she had somehow satisfied him.

      “What are your plans, Miss Gordon?” he asked, surprising her.

      “I’ve been planning—to head west, to Texas. I want to find out what happened to my father,” she said.

      “I think you’d do better to stay here,” the man said. “Safer.”

      “I have to go,” she said simply.

      “Have you received guidance on that matter in your dreams?” he asked.

      “No. But I know in my heart that I must search out the truth,” she said.

      “I understand. At any rate … Lieutenant Green, get that ridiculous hood off the young lady’s head.”

      “I can manage, sir,” she said, shuddering at the thought of Green touching her. She quickly pulled the canvas sack from her head.

      She looked up and found herself rising. She had never suspected … She had seen President Lincoln many times, and she had heard that he was haunted by dreams and sometimes driven to distraction by his wife’s obsession with the occult. But then, the poor man had lost two sons, and the challenge of keeping a nation together did not lessen a father’s grief or a mother’s desperation.

      He stretched out a hand. She accepted it. “You will be in my prayers, young lady.”

      “And you, sir, will be in mine.”

      “That is something for which I will be eternally grateful.”

      “Sir!” Green protested.

      “Please see to it that Miss Gordon is escorted home. And if she needs help in any way, I know that you will be kind enough to see that she receives it. Right, Lieutenant?”

      Green looked as if he were about to explode.

      “Right, Lieutenant?” Lincoln repeated softly.

      “Right, sir,” Green said.

      Lincoln tipped his hat to her. “I wish you could meet Mary. She might be greatly encouraged by knowing you.”

      “I am here for another fortnight, sir, and it would be my great pleasure to help you in any way.”

      “Then I shall make the arrangements. You have my thanks.”

      MARY LINCOLN DID NOT have her husband’s calm disposition.

      Alex felt she had to be honest and explain that she had no way to communicate with the dead, but she also found herself desperate to ease the woman’s suffering if she could. “Sometimes,” she said, “those who have gone before us appear in our dreams, and I believe that is their way of letting us know that they are happy in the next world.”

      “Has your father, or perhaps your fiancé, appeared in your dreams?” Mary asked anxiously.

      “No. But I have heard of it happening. Mrs. Lincoln, I know that your little ones are with God. You must find peace here on earth, and know that you will be reunited with them when the time is right.”

      She saw a peacefulness enter Mary Lincoln’s eyes then, and she left feeling that, in some small way, she had helped.

      DAYS LATER, WHEN SHE was actually leaving for her long journey, she saw the president again.

      He was riding in a carriage with his wife, as he often did on a Sunday. He didn’t see her, though. He was leaning back, his eyes closed, his expression that of a man pushed past the point of exhaustion. As she stepped into her own carriage, she wondered what dreams were plaguing the president as he wearily rested his head. Dreams were such unreliable messengers.

      No dream had warned her of her father’s death, when she had left him to return to her fiancé in the East.

      And no dream had come to alert her to what lay ahead.

      CHAPTER TWO

      IT WAS JUST SUNSET when Alex started toward the stairs of the boardinghouse that, following her father’s death, was now hers—despite the fact that he had left behind a new young wife, a woman named Linda Alex had yet to meet and couldn’t say she thought much of.

      She was shaking the dust of travel from her skirt before heading back up to her room, where clean clothes awaited after the long trip from the capital. She’d walked around the house, making note of the changes——some of them very strange—that had been made in her absence. Now she was looking forward to cleaning up and resting.

      That was when she heard the shots.

      Dozens of them, along with the sounds of horses’ hooves, and the whooping and hollering that came along with the sudden rush of men into town.

      “Oh, no!” Bert, the jack-of-all-trades her father had hired right after their arrival in Victory, Texas, came rushing into the entry hall and made his way to the front window. He peered carefully beyond the lace drapes, the color draining from his coffee-colored face. “It’s … them,” he said, shuddering.

      “What’s going on?” Alex demanded, turning. She felt a surge of fear streak through her, but she headed straight to the gun rack in the library. She had heard strange stories ever since her return, but she wasn’t one to put stock in spooky tales, not when she had a gun in her hand.

      Her father’s Colt automatic was right where it had always been, and it was loaded. She might go down in a hail of bullets, but she wasn’t going down without a fight.

      Bert turned to stare at her, and she realized she’d never seen him afraid before. “Alex, leave that thing be. It won’t help you any. These folks are—they’re animals. We’ve got to get down in the basement and hide. Don’t you see? There just ain’t no point in fighting these days.”

      No point in fighting? That was ridiculous. Victory had a sheriff, a deputy, and a town banker, three shopkeepers and a stable master—all of whom had fought in the war or on the frontier and knew how to defend themselves. Not to mention the fact that the saloon had several bartenders and “song and dance” girls who were tough as nails.

      Bert turned from the window to stare at her. “We’ve got to get into the basement. All of us. We’ve got to hide, and be real quiet. We’ll be safe down there.”

      “I’m not hiding in the basement. This town has guts, and if we fight, others will, too.”

      Beulah, the cook, appeared, running from the kitchen. “Come on! We’ve got to go hide.” She turned,

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