This short novel covers a span of five years, from 1924 to 1929, in the lives of the four motherless Hughes children, Evelyn, Floyd, Dale, and Vernon, who range in age from three to twelve years. They are left at the Wyoming State Orphanage in Cheyenne by their alcoholic father, Thomas. When he does not return for them, as he has promised to do, or pay forty dollars a month for their support, they become wards of the State Commission of Child and Animal Protection. The children have lived in poverty in a small broken-down house next to a railroad coaling station in Worland, Wyoming. Nevertheless, their very young mother somehow taught them to honor their father despite his flaws, and they have become an affectionate, close-knit family with deep loyalty to each other. When the children are placed separately in potential adoptive homes in various parts of Wyoming, they lose all contact with each other for a period of time, but regain their connection under circumstances that reinforce Evelyn's belief in a protective spirit. At the age of eighty, Evelyn begins an attempt to reconstruct this portion of her early family history, relying on snippets of memory, fragments of conversation, over-heard remarks, and a sketchy official record of the Hughes family obtained from the Wyoming State archives. What gradually emerges is not a true biography, but a story of love in many guises, which is as simple and as true as if it were a fairy tale.