Abigail Becker awoke with a sudden jolt of fear, the room was dark and for a few moments she couldn't place where she was. Then, somewhere off in the distance she heard a gunshot and suddenly it all came back with a rush, she was in the boomtown of Virginia City Nevada. She had been dreaming and it had been a worrisome dream. Her memory activated and brought her worries to the forefront. She had lost her man, the love of her life back when her father accused him of being a thief, of throwing in with the two Mexican vaqueros and stealing his cattle. How foolish she had been to believe her father. That belief had cost her the man she loved. Luke Scarbrough's words of two years ago were still fresh in her memory, "I'd not marry a woman who didn't believe in me." Four days ago she learned the truth, Luke had been innocent. Now two years after he had left her she had tracked him here to Virginia City only to learn that he had long since gone east to fight in the war between the North and the South. Through his friends and family she was in the process of getting his mailing address, but would he answer her letter when she sent it? Would he ever consider taking her back? Was he even still alive? ******** This is the epic saga of the life and times of the Scarbrough family during the era of the American Civil War.
About the Author: About the Author: Donald Wayne Manning. Born on a farm in rural southeastern Oklahoma, a state that is still known as the Indian Nation, and growing through childhood at a time when electricity had not yet been ex-tended to those rural areas. Mr. Manning remembers those times when life wasn't so easy. It was a time when a family grew its own food, drew its water from the well in a bucket, cooked on a wood burning cook stove, heated bath water over a fire and bathed in a wash tub. Farming was done with horses or mules and crops harvested by hand. Late fall was when the hogs were slaughtered and the meat that wasn't smoked was salted down in wooden barrels, with the fat rendered into lard and some made into lye soap. One of the highlights of his growing up was going to visit his grandparents' who lived even more primitive in the backcountry of Oklahoma's Kiamichi Mountains. The study of American History has been his lifelong passion and along with his real life experiences has given Mr. Manning special insight into how people lived during the western expansion and he incorporates it all into his Historical Fiction Novels of America and the Old West. He writes about people, country, rivers, terrain, landmarks, real historical towns and ghost towns, all places he has actually been to and incorporates them and historical events into the lives of the characters in his novels. Having lived and traveled extensively throughout the American West Mr. Manning now resides in northern California. He says; "Good story telling is a gift, sharpened by life's experiences. It's not something wholly learned out of text books. I thank God that I have been blessed with that gift."