Prologue

Northeast Texas, near the Arkansas border September 7, 1880

The oldest child of Nate and Lilly Webb looked out of the opening in the tarp covering their wagon. The only home she had ever known was growing smaller and smaller as the wagon moved slowly westward away from the little ranch here in northeast Texas. This wagon would be her home for the next month.
She would turn nineteen years old on the twenty-seventh of this month. She was so close to being an old maid. A spinster. Several of her friends were already married and expecting children. Molly Sinclair, who was now Mrs. Rupert Johnson - as she loved to remind everyone by throwing her new name and title at every opportunity - was only twenty-one and she was expecting her second child. Over achievers like her are what made it so hard for a girl like Evangeline. It wasn't that she didn't want to get married and have children. She did. But she just wasn't interested in any of the young men she knew. And it wasn't that they hadn't tried to court her. Many young men had tried. But all had failed to live up to what she imagined in her mind that her first and hopefully only love would be. Many people thought her foolish, some stubborn, others had called her snobbish and aloof. But none of it was true. She simply longed for so much more than what she had felt with any of those young men. Her rejection of so many of the young men in the area had not made her many friends, but she was alright with that too.  As long as she had her family nothing else mattered.


And thank goodness, Daddy and Mama hadn't forced her to marry, like poor Eloise Hunter.  When Eloise had failed to find a suitable husband by the age of nineteen, her father had chosen one for her.  She remembered the last church service that Eloise had attended.  When the service had ended, the newly wed Mrs. Paul Gentry had to have her hands pried from her mother's skirt hem and be dragged by her husband to the awaiting buckboard that was loaded with all her belongings.  The same buckboard that had carried her away, sobbing and begging her father not to make her go.  Evangeline often wondered about Eloise.  What if Eloise met the man of her dreams after she had already been married off to someone else?  It just didn't seem fair. 

She turned her attention to her thirteen year old brother, Gabe, who was busy shooting a rock from his sling shot at a bird that was roosting on the last of the fences that marked the edge of their ranch property. Their ranch house was now only a tiny dot on the horizon. Laughter from the front seat of the wagon caught her attention and she tuned to gaze at her parents who sat close together. Could there be another couple more in love than her mother and father? That was the kind of love she longed for. All you had to do was watch them awhile to see the devotion and desire they shared for one another. They were always anxious to be together, always finding any excuse to touch or cuddle or kiss. She smiled as she watched her petite, blond mother laugh at some silly thing her darkly handsome father had said, then lean up to kiss him and finally rest her head on his shoulder. 

She picked up the small book resting in her lap and lovingly touched the golden embossed words on the worn cover. "Evangeline." This story by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was her namesake. Her mama's favorite book had provided the names for both of her children, Evangeline and Gabriel. She opened the book and the pages automatically fell to the page that it had been opened to so many times. Silently she read her favorite lines:

Fair was she and young; but, alas! before her extended,
Dreary and vast and silent, the desert of life, with its pathway
Marked by the graves of those who had sorrowed and suffered
before her,
Passions long extinguished, and hopes long dead and abandoned,
As the emigrant's way o'er the Western desert is marked by
Camp-fires long consumed, and bones that bleach in the sunshine.
Something there was in her life incomplete, imperfect, unfinished;
As if a morning of June, with all its music and sunshine,
Suddenly paused in the sky, and, fading, slowly descended
Into the east again, from whence it late had arisen.
Sometimes she lingered in towns, till, urged by the fever within her,
Urged by a restless longing, the hunger and thirst of the spirit,
She would commence again her endless search and endeavour;
Sometimes in churchyards strayed, and gazed on the crosses and
tombstones,
Sat by some nameless grave, and thought that perhaps in its bosom
He was already at rest, and she longed to slumber beside him.
 Evangeline, separated from her lover, Gabriel, had searched years and years to find him. That's the kind of love she wanted to feel. The kind of love her parents shared. The kind she had never yet experienced and would always feel empty without. She would bear the stigma of the word "spinster" before she would marry just for the sake of marriage and children. So perhaps she was stubborn and foolish. But she would bear the burden of those labels as well.

She looked again out of the back of the wagon and she could no longer see their little house in the distance. Her life here was over and a new life awaited. "I hope my Gabriel is out there somewhere," she thought to herself as the wagon carried her further from the familiar and into the vast unknown.