THE FIRST GIRL OFF THE TRAIN
She has three years in a Kansas City parlour house that nobody knows about, and she is very good at making sure of it.
October 1883. Clara Whitfield steps off the train at Perdido, New Mexico Territory, the first of nine young women hired to prove that a railroad company can guarantee something about a woman. Daniel Mercer, a freight brakeman with a hundred and two dollars toward a claim, is the one thing she is not permitted to want. Then a polite man in a good coat gets off the westbound. He holds the note on her mother's land, and he is prepared to wait.