Pillsbury Crossing

In the second of The Manhattan Stories, Emma is nine on the day they meet, hot-headed and wild-haired. Akecheta is twelve, already the man of his house. He saves her life and tells her she belongs to him. As they grow together up on the frontier surrounding Manhattan, Kansas, he teaches her how to fish at Pillsbury Crossing, how to hunt deer in the woods at Deep Creek, and how to survive in a land where bears, snakes, accidents, and even nature itself can steal away your life in an instant. She slowly teaches him how to trust and how to share the burdens of his shameful past. When he graduates from high school an aunt sends him to a university in the other Manhattan, in New York. Emma continues her education at home, graduating from high school and then becoming one of the first women to study animal husbandry at Kansas State University. While she waits for Akecheta in Kansas, he delights in Manhattan, New York. He is dazzled by the theatres, the museums, and the grand library. He explores low places like the Bowery, where a winning hand at poker can mean losing your life, and ventures into high society in the elegant drawing rooms of the powerful and wealthy, where he discovers that the most dangerous thing of all may be a beautiful, well-born blonde.