Chapter Four
Collins Ranch, near Bozeman, Montana Territory
Wade Collins had been pacing the front porch of Inga Andersen’s boarding house for eleven minutes.
He had counted.
The eastern sky was going pink behind the Bridger Range. The cottonwoods along the track stood frost-rimed and very still in the morning cold. His pocket watch sat heavy against his ribs, and he had taken it out three times in the last quarter hour without learning anything new from it.
The front door opened behind him.
“Took you long enough,” he said before he could quite stop himself.
“It is fifteen minutes past first light. You said first light.”
“I said at first light.”
She walked past him toward the wagon without further comment.
He stood on the porch step with his hand on the rail for one full second longer than required.
She is beautiful in the morning, he thought, and then he thought, that thought is not going to assist me today, and he set it carefully down and followed her to the wagon.
Inga appeared at the door with a tin flask in her outstretched hand.
“For the wagon. Wade, you will take it and say thank you.”
“Thank you, Inga,” he replied, with the prompt obedience he had been giving Inga Andersen since he was ten years old and she had baked sweet rolls for his mother’s birthdays. Mary’s dearest friend in the world, then and now, six years after the burying.
“Zoe, child. Sunday. Half past ten. Bring the little one.”
“Sunday, Inga,” Zoe called back, smiling.
He handed Zoe up onto the bench, secured her trunk in the wagon bed, and swung up beside her. The bays leaned into the harness the moment he clicked his tongue, and the wagon rolled out of the cottonwood track and turned north into the gold morning.
The coffee flask sat on the small wooden ledge under the seat. He passed it to her.
She wrapped both hands around it and drank, making a small involuntary sound at the first swallow.
“Bless that woman,” she said softly.
“She has saved many lives this way.”
“You owe me one of those, then. I have been awake since four.”
“I have been awake since two.”
He glanced at her sideways.
The corner of his mouth moved.
“I have not slept less than five hours a night since I was twelve,” he replied. “You’ll have to teach me how.”
“I will charge a fair governess’s wage for the instruction.”
“Agreed.”
A small smile broke at the corner of her mouth, despite herself, and Wade kept his eyes on the road and his hands loose on the reins. The wagon climbed the low rise between the cottonwoods.
The track turned at the head of the rise. Below them, the ranch lay in its wide bowl of land.
The log house with the stone chimney. The wraparound porch his father had added the second summer. The barn, the corral, the bunkhouse, the kitchen garden, white-fenced against the deer. The creek curving through the south pasture, and the pines climbing the foothills to the north.
Wade drew the bays to a halt and watched Zoe.
She lifted her hand and laid it briefly against her ribs. Her blue eyes moved across the ranch below them slowly.
“Wade,” she said, breathless. “Your home is beautiful.”
The smallest muscle in his jaw worked.
“My father built it. Most of it himself. The chimney was a neighbor.”
“Tell me about him sometime.”
He had nothing to offer back to that, so he clucked at the bays, and the wagon rolled down the slope into the yard. Two herding dogs, a black-and-white and a grey, came out from under the porch at a happy trot.
“Job and Patience,” he said, jerking his chin at them. “My father named them. Job for the older one. He has lived a difficult life with dignity. Patience for the younger. She has lived a charmed life and pretends otherwise.”
“Job and Patience,” Zoe repeated, looking down at them as he handed her down from the wagon. “Your father had a sense of humor.”
“He did. It surprised people.”
Patience pressed her grey head against Zoe’s hand as though they had been introduced in some earlier life. Zoe’s eyes went bright. Wade looked at the porch step.
He led her through the house room by room.
The kitchen first, then the parlor with his mother’s Bible on the side table, the frayed ribbon still in Psalms where she had left it six years ago and where he had left it since.
Then the narrow staircase and the front room at the top, with the morning sun laid across the patchwork quilt and the sampler hung on the wall above the writing desk.
Be still, and know that I am God.
Zoe stopped at the threshold.
“This was your mother’s?”
“Yes.”
“You let no one touch it after she passed.”
“No. But it’s the best room in the house,” he said. “I thought it should be yours for the month.”
The breath went out of her, soft as a candle being put out.
“That is the kindest thing anyone has done for me in a long while. Thank you.”
He inclined his head, set his hat back on, walked the length of the hall, and went out the back door.
He stood in the cold yard with both hands shoved deep in his coat pockets. Then, he went to check the south pasture gate.
The south pasture gate was unlatched.
He latched it.
Several minutes later, small bare feet pelted down the hall inside the house.
The front door hit the frame, and a small figure streaked past the corner of the porch in a blur of yellow braids and brown gingham.
She skidded to a stop six feet from the back of the house and lifted her chin at the kitchen window as though taking aim.
Wade crossed the yard.
“Sadie.”
She turned. Her pale blue eyes—his mother’s eyes in a smaller, equally determined face—went from him to the house and back.
“She’s here?” Sadie asked.
“She’s here,” he confirmed evenly. “Shoes, Sadie.”
“I have shoes.”
“Where are they?”
“Inside.”
“Shoes,” Wade said. “Then come and find Miss Preston in the kitchen.”
“Yes, Uncle Wade.”
She turned, paused with one bare foot lifted, and looked back over her bony shoulder.
“Is she nice?”
A beat of quiet.
“She is, Sadie,” Wade replied warmly. “I think you’ll like her.”
Sadie ran inside and he exhaled slowly.
He gave it several minutes before he followed.
Through the kitchen window, standing in the yard with his coffee gone cold in his hand, Wade watched Zoe meet his niece.
Zoe was crouched in the middle of the kitchen floor when the child came down at a trot, shoes on now, braids re-tied, face scrubbed and damp.
Zoe had Sadie’s outstretched hand in both of hers and was shaking it with the grave formal respect one offered a foreign dignitary or a large dog.
Sadie stood with her chin lifted and her expression suspended between suspicion and interest.
He watched.
In three years, he had brought three women into this kitchen for Sadie’s consideration.
A widow from a Bozeman church whose Christian character was impeccable and whose manner had made Sadie retreat into silence for a week.
A cousin of George’s from Gallatin City who had called Sadie lamb in the first thirty seconds.
A woman from the quilting circle who had said, upon being introduced, that Sadie looked just like her uncle, and said it with insufficient enthusiasm.
Three women, three attempts, three failures. Each time, Sadie had looked at him afterward with the expression of a child who had learned to expect disappointment from adults.
He was expecting, now, a fourth failure.
Then Sadie introduced the chicken.
The chicken was a russet hen Sadie had been smuggling in and out of the house for six weeks, and which Wade had been pretending for six weeks to be unaware of, because the alternative was a conversation he did not have the vocabulary for.
He heard the small hurried feet run upstairs, the creak of Sadie’s bedroom door, and the return of the hurried feet.
Sadie appeared in the kitchen with the hen under her arm and the expression of a person placing a very serious bet.
Zoe looked at the chicken. She looked at it for a full second.
“What is her name?” Zoe asked.
“Henrietta.”
“Henrietta.”
“Yes. She is mostly a chicken, but she also knows things.”
“What kind of things?”
“She knows when Uncle Wade is coming home before he is at the gate. She runs to the window.”
“That is excellent intelligence in a chicken.”
“It is,” Sadie agreed.
“Does Henrietta live in the kitchen?”
A long pause.
“Sometimes,” Sadie said.
“Sometimes is a reasonable arrangement,” Zoe replied.
“I had a barn cat at home in Albany who lived sometimes in the kitchen and sometimes in the rafters of the henhouse, and we never quite came to an agreement about which was the official residence. I think she preferred it that way.” She paused.
“May I be introduced to Henrietta properly?”
Sadie lifted the hen toward her with both hands.
Zoe held out one finger, slow and respectful. Henrietta cocked her head. Zoe offered the finger toward the hen’s beak. The hen considered it for a long moment. Then she pecked it, very gently, with the dignity of an introduction concluded.
Sadie’s whole face changed.
The disappointment fell away. Her shoulders came down. Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened, and what came out of her was an honest, surprised laugh.
It was a small, bright laugh. It rang against the kitchen rafters.
It was the first laugh he had heard from this kitchen in three years.
Wade set his coffee cup on the porch rail.
With his back to the window and both hands flat against the rough wood of the rail, he looked out across the south pasture and breathed through his nose until the inside of his chest was steady again.
Indoors, Sadie was already telling Zoe what Henrietta thought of biscuits.
He stayed on the porch for another count of ten.
A horse came in fast across the yard.