His arm around Martha, Henry Winterson stood just behind Joe and both their faces wreathed in smiles. Emma came, and the younger children ran with open arms toward this man who had been their playmate at Fort Laramie. Joe looked through the cabin's door to see Barbara and Ellis in a lovers' embrace. He grinned; they thought they could not be seen. "Get down!" Joe sang out. "Get down and come on in! Where are your wagons?" "Left 'em back along the Trail when the Sarge here smelled Indians," a lanky Kentuckian on a brown horse said. "Say, this looks like good land. Is it all taken?" "Not near. There's room for all of you if you want to come and we have everything here. Everything but our wagon. That's lost, but we'll get another." He glanced again through the open door and shouted joyously, "All of you just better stay right here, at least through tomorrow. There's going to be a wedding!" About the Author Born in New York City, Jim Kjelgaard spent most of his boyhood in the Pennsylvania mountains where his father, a doctor, had a back-country practice. For a time after he finished his schooling, young Jim clung to vigorous open-air pursuits, becoming by turns a trapper, a teamster, a surveyor, a guide. In his late twenties, however, he set out to make writing his career. Since then hundreds of his short stories and articles have appeared in national magazines, and he has written a number of books for young people as well. With his wife and teen-age daughter, Mr. Kjelgaard makes his home in Phoenix, Arizona. But in his quest for stories he has travelled widely and often throughout North America. The vivid reality of _The Lost Wagon_, his first adult novel, grows out of his intimate, first-hand knowledge of the American West. Books by Jim Kjelgaard THE LOST WAGON CRACKER BARREL TROUBLE SHOOTER THE SPELL OF THE WHITE STURGEON BIG RED REBEL SIEGE FOREST PATROL BUCKSKIN BRIGADE CHIP, THE DAM BUILDER FIRE HUNTER IRISH RED KALAK OF THE ICE A NOSE FOR TROUBLE SNOW DOG TRAILING TROUBLE WILD TREK THE EXPLORATIONS OF PERE MARQUETTE OUTLAW RED THE STORY OF THE MORMONS Why would a farmer exchange his plowed fields for a wilderness? Why would a husband and father take his family from civilization into an untamed land? In the middle of the last century, thousands of Americans pushed westward into the unknown--and Joe Tower, who had never been fifty miles from his birthplace, was one of them. _The Lost Wagon_ tells the gripping, warmly human story of why he ventured along the Oregon Trail and of how he and his family met its hazards....