Nineteen-year-old Opal, a freed slave working as a dressmaker in California in 1860, meets dashing Gabriel Fortune who makes her forget her unadventurous fianc? Willie.
Seventeen-year-old Mattie leaves her sister Ivy in Last Chance, California, and disguises herself as a boy in order to get a job with the Pony Express, finding adventure, facing danger, and falling in love.
Eighteen-year-old Ivy, the quiet school teacher in the mining town of Last Chance, finds she must deal with her talent for writing as well as an old love from the past.
