The Lawman's Christmas Gift (A Prairie Christmas #2)

Chapter 1 The Man Who Stopped Praying

The last time Nathaniel Horne had prayed was at Gettysburg.

Not at the end of it — not over the graves, not in the hospital tent, not in the weeks after when other men who had been there found their way back to God by the road of gratitude, thank You for letting me live.

Nathaniel had prayed at the beginning of it, on the morning of the second day, before the charge on the second ridge, when he had been twenty-two years old and had believed, with the complete confidence of someone who had not yet learned what belief cost, that the Lord was on their side and that this mattered.

The Lord had been on no one's side at Gettysburg.

Or He had been on everyone's side equally, which amounted to the same thing from where Nathaniel was standing, which was in a field with four thousand men dead around him and more arriving at the condition by the minute, and the prayers of the dying indistinguishable from the prayers of the killing, all of them going up to the same sky and the same sky receiving all of them with the same impartial silence.

He had stopped praying that afternoon. Not as a decision — he was not a man who made dramatic decisions and then announced them.

More as the natural conclusion of a long and careful observation.

He had been observing the evidence for and against the proposition that God heard prayers and acted on them, and by the afternoon of the second day at Gettysburg he had concluded that the evidence was insufficient.

That had been twenty years ago. He was forty-two now and the sheriff of Larimer County, Colorado, and in twenty years the evidence had not materially improved.

He was not, he would have said if asked, an unhappy man.

He was a functional man. He did his job with the focused efficiency that his deputies had come to regard as the defining quality of working for Nathaniel Horne, which was that things got done, properly, the first time, without drama or excess.

The county was orderly. The law was enforced without cruelty and without favoritism.

The jail was clean. The paperwork was current.

These were not small things. He had seen counties where they were not true, and he understood from the comparison that he was doing something of value.

What he had not done, in twenty years, was let anyone close enough to notice that the functional man had a considerable amount of interior territory that was not functional at all, that was in fact the locked and boarded version of something that had once been open and inhabited and had been closed after the war and had remained closed, with considerable effort, ever since.

He was good at the closing. He had had twenty years of practice.

On the first of December, 1883, Nathaniel Horne rode out of Pinecrest on his gray horse toward the Longmont road to meet the Denver stage, which was three hours late due to what the post rider had described, with admirable understatement, as road difficulties in the pass.

The road difficulties were, as he had assessed from the quality of the clouds over the northern peaks, the beginning of a serious storm.

He was riding out to see whether the stage needed assistance and to carry two letters to the Granger family on his way back, which was not his job strictly speaking but which was the kind of thing that happened in a county of three hundred souls where you were simultaneously the law, the emergency service, and occasionally the post.

He did not know, riding out into the cold first of December with the storm building on the northern horizon, that the Denver stage was carrying a woman named Mercy Alcott who was going to require significantly more than assistance.

He did not know that the next three days were going to be the most disruptive of the twenty years he had spent making sure nothing disrupted him.

He rode. The gray horse, whose name was Absalom on account of his mane and his opinions about authority, moved through the cold air with the steady efficiency of a well-trained animal who had made this road many times and had no particular feelings about it in either direction.

Nathaniel looked at the mountains and thought about the stage schedule and the storm and the Granger letters and did not think about anything else, which was a technique he had refined to the point where it was almost always successful.

Almost.

* * *

He found the stage two miles below the Longmont pass, stopped in the road with one wheel off the axle and the driver attempting repairs with the focused irritation of a man who had done this before and not enjoyed it the first time.

There were four passengers. A hardware merchant from Denver named Patterson who had immediately taken charge of the wheel situation in the confident way of a man whose actual knowledge of wheel mechanics was limited but whose confidence in his own usefulness was unlimited.

A young couple traveling to Fort Collins to see the wife's family for Christmas, sitting on the luggage in the cold with the shared misery of people who have been in a stage for six hours and have not yet arrived.

And a woman sitting on a fallen log at the side of the road, with a carpetbag on her lap and a Bible open on top of the carpetbag and her face turned up toward the sky with an expression that was, as far as Nathaniel could determine from thirty feet away, the expression of someone who was genuinely enjoying themselves.

He pulled Absalom up and looked at this for a moment.

The woman was perhaps twenty-eight, with dark hair pinned under a plain hat that the wind was making its best effort to dislodge, and the kind of face that was not beautiful in any conventional arrangement of the features but was entirely, specifically itself — the kind of face that you looked at and thought: I know exactly what this person is like, and then upon further acquaintance discovered that you were right about the warmth and wrong about everything else.

She was reading her Bible. Her lips were moving slightly.

The stage wheel was off the axle, the hardware merchant was explaining his wheel theory to the driver, the young couple was sharing a miserable look, the temperature was dropping, the storm was advancing from the north at the pace of something that had made up its mind, and this woman was sitting on a log in the middle of all of it reading her Bible with the serenity of someone in a comfortable chair by a good fire.

Nathaniel dismounted. He went to the driver first, because that was the sensible order of operations.

"Sheriff Horne," the driver said, with the relief of a man who has been waiting for someone competent to appear. "Axle's sound, just the wheel come loose. We'll have it back on in twenty minutes if your man there — " he gestured at Patterson, "— would stand back and let me work."

"Give him some room," Nathaniel told Patterson, in the tone that ended conversations.

Patterson stood back.

He went to check on the young couple, who were cold but uninjured, and then he turned to the woman on the log.

She looked up from her Bible when he was still several feet away, as though she had heard him coming not by sound but by some other means, and she looked at him with brown eyes that were direct in the way of someone who looked at things without managing the looking.

"Sheriff," she said. Not a question. She had registered the badge.

"Are you all right, ma'am?" he said.

"Perfectly," she said. "It's a lovely afternoon, considering."

He looked at the storm on the northern horizon. He looked at the wheel situation. He looked at the temperature, which was dropping visibly — you could see it in the quality of the breath coming off the horses.

"Considering," he said.

"The wheel will be fixed," she said. "The storm is still some hours off.

The driver knows what he's doing, despite the advice he's receiving.

" She glanced at Patterson, who was watching the repair work with the sustained helpfulness of a man who had been told to stand back and was interpreting this as stand back slightly.

"I find that most situations are less dire than they appear if you wait a moment before deciding what to think of them. "

Nathaniel looked at her. She said this the way she said everything, he would come to understand — as simple fact, without performance, the way you stated the temperature or the weather.

"Where are you headed?" he asked.

"Pinecrest," she said. "I'm a seamstress. I have a commission from the Caldwell ranch — a Mrs. Caldwell ordered curtains and a dress length before December. I'm to deliver and fit them."

He knew the Caldwell ranch. He knew Clara Caldwell, who had arrived in December of the previous year and had reorganized the county's opinion of what a rancher's wife looked like. "That's four miles south of Pinecrest," he said.

"I was told I could arrange a ride from town," she said.

"You could," he said. "If the stage gets you to Pinecrest before dark."

She looked at the sky with the assessing quality she had apparently brought to all assessments. "It will," she said.

She was right. The wheel was repaired in eighteen minutes, the stage reached Pinecrest by four o'clock, and the storm held off until evening.

What happened after, none of those things did.