Frederik Bottner awakened in the half-light before dawn, jostled by die sleeping stirrings of the stranger who shared his train seat. He glanced at the dim landscape passing by the window and then looked harder trying to make out if a silvery gleam high on the hillsides might be snow.

Surely not, not in September. But then, Frederik had no references for deciphering country like this.

Through a fitful night, he had been aware in snatches of the train passing from short-grass prairie into Montana's western mountains. Its coal-fed engine had labored up inclines, jerking him awake over and over as it pulled passenger coaches and boxcars over high trestles and through dark tunnels.

Boxcars: They were emigrant cars; each rented by a homesteading family for $22.50 and filled with chests and plow blades, seed bags and rootstock all rubbing and creaking together, each packed with nervous animals unsteady on rumbling floors.

Frederik's horse, Patch, was in one of them, along with the few head of livestock and some tools that were about all Frederik still owned now that the South Dakota homestead was sold and the debts on it cleared. His belongings didn't half fill the car and he'd shared the rental with a family who needed extra space.

That is a dusting of snow, he thought. How early does winter come to Montana, anyway? There was so much he didn't know about this place he'd decided on. But at least the journey was over The train slowed, whistle blowing, as it pulled into Missoula. Outside the window, railroad men shouted orders and did work that made metal clang on metal.

Frederik got his traveling bundle and his father's violin from the overhead rack.

THE FIVE-MILE wagon journey from town to a crossing over Rattlesnake Creek took Frederik and his Uncle Joe until early afternoon, even without the livestock they'd arranged to have brought after them.

"Are we about to your place?" Frederik asked, as his uncle guided the team onto the narrow bridge.

"No! We've still got several miles to go. And more getting to know each other to do, also. What I want you to tell me—"

Whatever Uncle Joe's question was, it didn't get asked, because just then a shot rang out, frightening the horses and throwing Joe into a struggle to keep the wagon on the bridge. Frederik, scrambling to the back where Patch was tethered, saw a young man gallop by on a large roan.

"Mein..." His uncle swore, half in German, half in English, as the wagon lurched back from a near plunge into the creek. Frederik grabbed for Patch's lead while his uncle fought to bring the careening team to a halt. And then, as the wagon pitched into the long ascent up from the bridge, the horses slowed of their own accord.

"Who was that?" Frederik asked when he returned to his seat.

"Augie O'Leary," Uncle Joe answered, sounding half strangled with anger "Young hooligan."

"But what was he doing? Did he shoot at us?"

"More likely shot to scare. He and his father, Naill, do their best to sour this valley, and for no reason other than they're plain crazy mean. I was able to buy my place because of Augie. The Middlers, that I got it from, pulled out rather than let their daughter get tangled up with him."

"Oh!" Frederik considered the information about the O'Learys before turning his attention to the rest of what his uncle had said. "You're not homesteading?" Frederik asked. He wondered why anybody would want to pay for land when you could get it from the government for free.

"The Middlers wanted to sell, and four hundred fifty dollars for a quarter section and all the buildings—it was a bargain compared with working up a place from scratch."

"But you got the O'Learys for neighbors?"

"I keep a good fence between me and them," Uncle Joe said. "I stay clear of Naill's land and his mine claim, and I generally don't have trouble."

UNCLE JOE'S PLACE, one of the homes farthest out in the Rattlesnake, was reached by a wagon-track road that dipped and swayed alongside the main creek.

The ride took Frederik and his uncle past ever more isolated dwellings where men walked behind mule-pulled plows to turn over field stubble, children dug potatoes, and women stirred wash in open kettles. Small plots of cleared land hugged the creek bottom or canted upward onto brushy hillsides where cattle and sheep foraged among tree stumps.

His uncle, following Frederik's gaze, said, "A lot of this country was logged for railroad ties back in the eighties."

Finally they turned onto a pair of tracks that led through a ragged field to a small cabin.

"This is it," Joe said. "Lots to be done, and I'll be glad for your help."

Just then a voice shouted, "Bottner!" and they turned to see three people on horseback coming from the road.

As the riders neared, Frederik recognized the roan horse and realized one of the people was Augie O'Leary. The others were a large, rough-looking man and a girl about Frederik's own age. They led packhorses loaded down with panniers, tools, and bedrolls.

Uncle Joe, flushing, muttered, "Dear Lord, I thought we made a bargain: I'd be civil to Naill O'Leary when I saw him, and You'd make sure I didn't see him."

The riders halted a few feet off, and the older man told Uncle Joe, "Augie said you was bringing new people. You warn 'em to stay off my land."

"Now, Naill," Frederik's uncle answered in a calm voice, "my nephew Frederik here is all the new people, and I'll see he knows what's yours. Nobody's looking to encroach."

Augie pulled up a deer rifle and casually aimed it just past Frederik. Grinning, he jerked it back in mock recoil.

Frederik and his uncle both started angrily forward but halted when Naill ordered his son, "Put it away."

The girl, looking annoyed and embarrassed, told Frederik, "Don't mind my brother He doesn't have good sense or manners, either one."

She had green eyes and shining red hair, and when she smiled, Frederik saw dimples dent in at both sides of her mouth. "I'm Maureen O'Leary," she said, "and I'll like having a new neighbor Will you be going into town to high school?"

"I don't know," Frederik answered, with no idea what the plans for him were.

"I'll be starting my freshman year after we come down from the mine," Maureen said. "Maybe we can ride in together some."

"He's too old for school," Naill O'Leary told her and ended the talk by wheeling his horse around. "You, too, if you get any ideas I don't like. Let's go."

After they'd left Frederik said, "I see what you mean about them souring things. Why were you even nice to that man?"

"It's just good business to get along with neighbors," Uncle Joe answered, pausing to tamp tobacco into his pipe. "Besides, I feel sorry for Naill O'Leary. Ever since his wife left him, he's poured his soul into a worthless mine. He's not the first person gone addled over losing a spouse."

Like my father, though that was different, Frederik thought, as Joe went on, "I've been told his wife ran off years ago, saying she was tired of living with a man who'd never make good."

"Maureen's mother you mean?"

"Yes." Uncle Joe looked at Frederik sharply. "And Augie's."

"And the O'Learys were the reason the Middlers left? Frederik wanted to be sure he had it straight.

"That's so," Joe answered. Then he laughed and slapped Frederik on the shoulder "Of course, the Middlers didn't have any son to notice a pretty girl with green eyes. If they had, that might have changed things."