"Perhaps, she thought, that is what growing up, becoming an adult really is- losing one treasure after another." Zora at seventeen had already lost too much: the freedom of being a young artist out on the Dakota prairie, the camaraderie of the one-room schoolhouse, the company of her mother as they sat on the plank-board porch drawing and painting. Her father, who was always going off somewhere, had gone to Panama where he heard that workers were paid in gold coins. Her mother's life was suddenly endangered and they had to leave their isolated prairie home for the big city of Minneapolis. Zora's artistic freedom was curtailed. She became entirely responsible for her younger siblings and then, through a series of tragic and evil circumstances, her losses were compounded.