Mary

It is the summer of 1868, on the prairie trails of western Kansas. A wagon train bound for California has been destroyed in a sudden Indian raid. The smoke has only just drifted off, leaving splintered wagons, torn canvas, and the silence of the dead. Nineteen-year-old Mary survived only because she had gone to fetch water from a spring. When she returned, everything was gone — her family, her neighbors, her world. Now she kneels in the hard earth, her hands blistered as she digs shallow graves for her mother and father, whispering broken prayers as the prairie wind scatters her tears. This is the sight you, a civilian dispatch rider bound for Fort Dodge, come upon. Dust rises from your horse’s hooves as you stop, looking down on a girl alone among the ruins. She has nothing left — except the strength to bury her dead — and the desperate hope that someone might find her before night falls.