Children of the West — Paul L. Thompson

A young mother suffers and dies three years after giving birth to her third child. She left behind a nine-year-old son Jimmy, her six-year-old daughter Sara and three year old Tommy. Sam, husband and father blamed the death of his beautiful wife on birthing the last child. Sam turned to drinking and gambling, leaving his three small children alone on their river bottomland. Years pass and Jimmy is twelve, Sara nine and Tommy is now six. It looks as if a new comer to White Water is trying to steal their hard worked fall feed crop and river bottomland. Why would a grown man hire gunfighters and killers just to get a few thousand dollars worth of grain? Do they have something more devious in mind? When little Tommy is kidnapped, they went too far. Nobody messes with Jimmy's family and gets away with it for long. Now they've gone and made a very big, fatal mistake. Yep, they went and made him mad.