CHAPTER TWO
The train west was a different country from the train Margaret had known as a girl, the short hops between Boston and her aunt's house in Providence, where the scenery never had time to change before the whistle announced arrival.
This was travel of another order completely—days of it, the land unspooling in long, patient reels past the window, forest giving way to farmland, farmland giving way to something flatter and stranger the farther they went, until by the third day she began to understand why the advertisements called it a territory and not a state. It did not yet feel wholly claimed.
She had a seat by the window in the second-class car, which suited her, both for the view and for the modest privacy it afforded a woman traveling alone.
She kept Mr. Draycott's letters in the inside pocket of her traveling coat, close enough to touch without looking, and she divided her days between the window, a small stock of novels she'd brought from her father's shelves, and a growing correspondence in her own head—letters to her mother, to Louisa, that she composed silently as the miles went by and would write out properly once she'd arrived and had a proper desk to write them on.
It was somewhere past Chicago, in the long grey stretch of Illinois farmland, that she fell into conversation with the woman across the aisle.
Mrs. Ida Kessler was perhaps fifty, broad and weathered in the specific way of women who had spent decades out past where the railroads first reached, and she was returning, she explained without much prompting, from a visit to her late sister's children in Ohio—a visit she'd made, she said, "because someone had to see to the burying correctly, and their father's no use for anything but cattle and complaining. "
"You're a rancher's wife, then," Margaret said, grateful for the conversation after two days of near-silence.
"Twenty-two years, come spring. Cheyenne way, though we started further north, up near the Powder River, before my husband got sense enough to move somewhere a body could buy flour without a three-day ride.
" Mrs. Kessler's eyes went to the letter just visible at the edge of Margaret's bag, and to the particular set of Margaret's traveling clothes—good enough for a respectable household, worn enough to show they'd been made to last rather than to impress.
"And you. Junction City, is it? I saw the porter tag your trunk. "
"Junction City, yes. I'm to be married there.
" Margaret said it clearly, the way she'd decided somewhere around Ohio she would say it from now on, without embarrassment and without excessive explanation.
There was no use pretending shame over a thing she'd chosen with her eyes open.
"By arrangement. His name is Caleb Draycott. He runs cattle."
"Everyone runs cattle out there, dear, or wishes they did.
" Mrs. Kessler said it without unkindness, but something in her tone made Margaret look up from her book truly for the first time since the conversation began.
"Draycott. I don't know the name, but Junction City's a fair piece from where we settled.
New town, isn't it? Grown up around the rail junction the last few years. "
"That's my understanding. Mr. Draycott's father established the ranch some years before that—before the rail line reached that far, I believe."
"Ah. One of the old open-range men, then, if the father got there early.
" Mrs. Kessler settled back in her seat, and there was something in the way she said old open-range men that Margaret couldn't quite read—not disapproval, exactly, but a kind of weathered knowing, the tone of a woman who'd watched a certain story play out more than once and had opinions about how it generally ended.
"Well. I hope for your sake he's kept his herd sensible. "
"Sensible in what way?"
"In the way that matters, come January." Mrs. Kessler glanced out the window at the flat grey country sliding past, and for a moment her face took on an expression Margaret would only later understand to be a kind of private remembering.
"I don't like to trouble a young bride with old woman's talk before she's even arrived.
But I'll tell you what I told my own niece, who married into ranching two years back: ask him how many head the land can carry, and ask him how many head he's actually got.
If those two numbers don't match, dear, you find out why before you find out how cold a Wyoming winter can get. "
Margaret felt something small and cool settle in her chest, the distinct sensation she associated with catching an error in a column of figures—not alarm, not yet, but the beginning of an attentiveness that would not entirely leave her for the rest of the journey.
"You make it sound as though there's a specific danger in it. "
"There's a certain danger in everything out there, Miss Colston, if you'll forgive my saying so.
Weather most of all. I've seen good men lose the better part of a herd to a single hard winter, and I've seen the ones who'd overstocked lose everything, right down to the last steer, because there wasn't grass enough under the snow to carry them through even an ordinary bad spell, let alone—" She stopped herself, and something in her face closed, the way a door closes when a person decides a subject isn't fit for present company.
"Well. There's no sense in borrowing trouble before you've even seen the place.
Every year the old-timers say it feels like a bad one coming, and every year most turn out ordinary enough.
I daresay this one will be no different. "
"But you don't sound utterly certain of that," Margaret said.
Mrs. Kessler was quiet a moment, watching the fields go by, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped into something more careful.
"My husband's been ranching thirty years, dear, and he's got a feeling about this one he hasn't had since '73.
The geese went south early. The horses have grown their winter coats thick as I've ever seen them, and grew them a full month before they ought.
He says the beaver have been laying in wood for their dams like they're expecting something biblical.
" She gave a short laugh, as if to undercut her own words.
"Old rancher's superstition, mostly. But I've learned not to entirely discount thirty years of a man watching the sky for a living. "
Margaret turned this over for a long moment, watching the same fields Mrs. Kessler watched, though she saw nothing in them but ordinary Illinois farmland readying itself for an ordinary autumn.
She was a woman who trusted figures over feelings, columns over intuition—it was, after all, precisely the discipline that had gotten her family through two years of crisis without complete ruin, the habit of trusting only what could be counted and verified.
A rancher's wife's talk of geese and beaver dams was not, by that measure, evidence of anything at all.
And yet.
"I'll ask him," she said finally. "About the numbers. Thank you, Mrs. Kessler."
"See that you do." The older woman patted Margaret's hand with the brisk, unsentimental affection of a stranger who nonetheless meant it kindly.
"A sensible young woman like yourself, going into a marriage of arrangement rather than romance—there's no shame in it, mind, I did the same myself and it's served me well enough—but a sensible woman ought to go in with her eyes as open as she can get them.
Romance forgives a great many oversights a marriage of practicality can't afford. "
They spoke of other things after that—Mrs. Kessler's grandchildren, the quality of the dining car's coffee, the especial indignity of Illinois mud in October—but Margaret found the conversation returning to her at odd moments over the following two days, whenever the train stopped long enough for her to notice the quality of the light, or the particular sharpness of the wind when she stepped onto a platform to stretch her legs.
She had come west prepared to manage a household, to keep books, to be the sort of capable, unromantic wife Mr. Draycott's letters had asked for.
She had not thought to prepare herself to question whether the foundation she was marrying into was as solid as his letters implied.
She took out his most recent letter again on the fourth night, by the low light of the car's oil lamp, and read it more carefully than she had before—not for sentiment this time, but for information, the way she might once have reread her father's ledgers looking for the entry that didn't add up.
There was nothing in it, she decided, that contradicted Mrs. Kessler's warning.
But there was nothing in it that addressed the question either, and she found herself noticing, for the first time, how carefully the letter avoided any mention of numbers at all—no count of cattle, no acreage, nothing beyond the general and reassuring word prosperous, which she now understood to be doing a great deal of unexamined work.
I am likely worrying over nothing, she wrote in her head, composing the letter to Louisa she would send once she'd arrived.
A rancher's wife on a train has filled my head with old wives' talk about geese and beaver dams, and I am far too sensible a woman to put much stock in it.
And yet I find I mean to ask Mr. Draycott some plain questions the moment it's suitable to ask them, and I mean to listen carefully to how he answers.
By the fifth day the farmland had given way wholly to something wilder and emptier, grass rolling to a horizon that seemed to have no proper edge, and the other passengers—fewer now, the second-class car thinning out as families disembarked at smaller and smaller stations—had begun speaking in the specific hushed, anticipatory way of people nearing the end of a long journey.
Mrs. Kessler left the train at Cheyenne, pressing Margaret's hand once more at the platform.
"Ask him the numbers, dear," she said, by way of farewell. "And if you don't like his answer, you write to me. I mean that. There's a Mrs. Ida Kessler outside Cheyenne who'll always have a spare room for a sensible woman in trouble, arranged marriage or no."
Margaret thanked her, and meant it, and watched the older woman disappear into the small crowd on the platform with a feeling she couldn't fully name—gratitude, mixed with something more unsettled, the sense of having been handed a warning she didn't yet have enough information to clearly weigh.
The last leg of the journey passed in a kind of suspended quiet.
She watched the land change again as they climbed toward higher ground, the grass growing shorter and more silvered, distant mountains beginning to show themselves blue and serrated along the western edge of the sky.
She thought of Boston, now four days and two thousand miles behind her, and found it already beginning to feel less like the place she'd left than like a story she'd once read about someone else's life.
She thought, too, of the brass button still wrapped in Louisa's handkerchief, and took it out once more to turn over in her fingers as the train began, at last, to slow.
Junction City, read the sign at the small, raw-timbered depot, the paint still fresh enough to smell faintly of pine sap even through the closed window.
Margaret straightened her hat, smoothed her skirts, and gathered Mr. Draycott's letters into her hand as though they were a kind of armor—which, she supposed, in their way, they were.
She did not know, as the train shuddered to its final stop and the platform outside filled with strangers, which of the faces waiting there might belong to the man she'd crossed a continent to marry.
She knew only that she meant to ask him her numbers simply, and soon, and that she would not, whatever Mrs. Kessler's talk of geese and beaver dams might or might not amount to, allow herself to be managed by vague reassurance when precision was what the question required.
It was, she thought, stepping down onto the platform into a wind sharper and colder than any she'd known in Boston, exactly the kind of resolve her father would have been proud of.
She had no way of knowing yet how soon, and how thoroughly, that resolve would be tested.