The Kai People are treated badly because they are different. The Kai-primitive fisherman and farmers-grow and cook their food while others live on food capsules; Kai men and women dress in brown robes instead of colorful one-piece tunics, take numbers for names, and believe in the mysteries of the Circle.

With the blessing of the Supreme Ruler of the Galaxy, they twice suffered invasion and genocide.

For the Kai, a new Circle Journey has started to take them away from their persecutors forever.

Western Heart Series:
"Marrying Tree Stories"
"Crossing Niobrara"

Twenty-four more stories about the scramble to find wives and create western families. From after the Civil War and up into the 1890's America had more unmarried men and women than at any other time in its history, and a large number of war widows. More men went west than women did. Men went west for a chance to start a new business, timber, mining, gold, silver, land, and adventure. When established, a man wanted a wife and family. However, unmarried women out in the West were scrarce.

These stories go up to World War I era. However, in some areas of the West, men still scramble to find a bride. Western women in large numbers go off to college and to find work elsewhere.

The city of Tyros is attacked by a force from the Imidos planet; and the ruler, the Tyro, is old. Damar becomes Tyro during the war and struggles to find a way for the people of Tyros to survive. Some of his people escape into the desert, but he remains behind to be captured. Tyro and his aids are taken aboard an old space ship. When Tyros explodes, the Imido Commander has to protect himself with a creative story. He destroys those below on the planet and sends the captives off into unknown space locked in prison cells in their unmanned old extra freighter. Only a meteor shower's damage to the old ship allows them to escape from their cells, and from the old crippled ship caught in the planet's gravity. Only three manage to get down to the planet below, and only Tyro lives long enough to join a group of primitives. He becomes the first extraterrestrial.

Anyone researching their family history hopes to find more than names and dates. Corena, a wealthy Seattle socialite is no different. In a 1957 newspaper interview she tells of her genealogy project, and that she has decided to make public her findings. Her granmother, Molly Rosebrook age 92, reads the interview and asks Corena to visit her. Molly gives Corena a diary kept by Molly's parents, Corena's Great Grandparents. Read along with Corena the 1865-68 diary written during Molly's first three years. It is a story of romance, smuggling, poaching, death, prospecting, outlaws, Indians, escape from England and pursuit across America.

Looking back at the West in Movies, television, and books a man and woman either kiss or ride off together at the end. In truth, more men moved West of the Mississippi during the 1800's than women. After a man managed to get a ranch, farm, mine, or business started he wanted a family -- a wife and children. For those that could not afford the time or money to go back East courting that was a problem. The shortage of women and the distances in the West required courting adjustments, just as raw living conditions of the frontier forced on people changes in making a living. This book of two dozen short stories deals with the fictional creation of Western familes from 1860-1900.