Books for gifted children from Royal Fireworks Press, publishers for the gifted education curriculum.

Courageous Journey

Novel

Class sets of 20 or more: $7.00 each. (Order Code: 3601S) Add to Cart

Fifteen-year-old Kate and eleven-year-old Will must travel from Pennsylvania to Texas in the spring of 1837. Their father has a new homestead and has written for his family to join him. But, the youngsters’ mother and sisters and brother are dead. They all died in an epidemic. Kate determines that she and Will will make the dangerous trip alone. She will negotiate a good price for the farm herself, plot the trip and take good care of her brother.

Kate and Will have barely begun their journey before two outlaws begin to track them, certain that they are carrying a bundle of cash. The youngsters, armed with only a slingshot and a Colt revolver, pit their brains against the outlaw’s brawn as they determine to continue their perilous trek. Between them and Papa lay fifteen hundred miles of hostile American frontier.

Rivaling Kate’s and Will’s hair-raising escapes on land, outrunning violent characters and wanted criminals, are their tumultuous keelboat adventures down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers where the most important fact of life is the right of way belongs to the biggest and meanest steamboat. Pirates and waterfalls followed.

The youngsters do make it to Papa’s ranch, only to find a full-scale shoot-out in progress. Seems a flim-flam man is claiming the ranch is his and hired-guns are in the thick of it against Papa. But Kate and Will get help from a savvy outlaw they befriended along the way and two surprise, just-in-the-nick-of-time heroes.

Courageous Journey is an action-packed all-American Western with flashes of comedy, a breath of a first love for Kate, and a wonderful dog/wolf heroine called Lucy.

Paul Snyder resides in Pennsylvania.

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