Nigel must choose between entering an orphanage or entering an apprenticeship on a mule train.

To Nigel’s horror, Comanches slaughter Reverend John Blackthorn and his family before his father preaches one word. Nigel survives by following his mother’s instructions to hide in a hollow tree. Nigel prays for God to send help. Instead, Pascal LeBrun, a roaming muleteer, rides to the smoke of the burning wagons to find Nigel, who believed cooking is a woman’s work. Alone, he doesn’t even know how to cook to survive. Pascal solves that problem.

Plump, lazy, and spoiled, Nigel enters an unwelcome new world–work or starve. He finds survival is the way of life on the prairie. Worse yet, English is a little used third language. Riding across the prairie in a wagon bored him. The Comanche attack terrified him. Working dawn to dark on the mule train became drudgery.

Two hundred miles later, when the mule train reaches the first white settlement, Pascal gives Nigel a choice: enter an orphanage, or enter an apprenticeship on the mule train for a piddling wage.
Years later, Nigel wonders if the orphanage would have been easier.