Chapter Four
Sam had a rule about mornings. You got up before the sun, you built the fire, you made coffee, and you didn't talk to anybody until the first cup had done its job.
A man needed at least twenty minutes of silence before the world started making demands, and Sam had been following this particular doctrine for the better part of fifteen years without exception.
He'd been up since before first light, feeding the cookstove until the firebox roared and the kitchen turned warm enough to loosen the cold out of his joints.
After three weeks of sleeping on frozen ground and waking up stiff as old leather, the heat coming off that stove hit so good he'd stripped down to just his trousers and boots and stood there soaking it in, letting the warmth work into his shoulders and his back, and the knot between his shoulder blades that hadn't let up since somewhere around the second week on Dutton's trail.
One of the few pleasures of coming home was a hot stove and no one around to care whether he wore a shirt or not.
He poured the coffee and drank it black while standing at the counter, the way he'd done every morning since he'd built this kitchen with his own two hands.
He looked out of the window at the yard.
He'd need to get into town today. If this weather settled in properly, they could be snowed in for a week, maybe longer, and the supplies Sarah had left wouldn't stretch that far with two people eating them.
The flour was running low already, the coffee beans were down to maybe three days' worth, and the salt pork was almost gone.
He'd need to take the buckboard, and he'd need to take Evelyn with him, because leaving a woman alone at the homestead with weather like this coming in sat wrong with him, regardless of how he stood on the woman in question.
He hadn't figured that part out yet. She'd held a skillet on him, she'd fallen on the ice carrying shingles she had no business carrying, and she'd made biscuits he hadn't eaten because eating them would have meant sitting at her table and talking.
The coffee needed to be stronger.
A floorboard creaked behind him, from the stairs, and Sam turned with his cup still halfway to his mouth.
Evelyn Granger stood at the bottom of the stairs in her wool dress with her hair pinned up and her boots on, ready for the day, and looking directly at his bare chest.
Her hands flew up over her eyes. Both of them, flat against her face, like a child playing a parlor game. She spun sideways and presented him with her shoulder and the side of her head and approximately nothing else.
"Mr. Cooper!"
Sam looked down at himself, then back at her, then down at himself again.
"Mornin'."
"Would you, could you kindly, I'd be much obliged if you would dress yourself when you're in the common rooms of this house!"
He blinked. “You already seen me topless.”
“Those were different circumstances!”
“How so?”
“I was afraid for my life.”
He took a sip of his coffee and took his time with it.
The flush climbing up the side of her neck, the part he could see past her hands, had gone from pink to something closer to red.
The whole picture—this prim Illinois seamstress standing in his kitchen with her palms clamped over her own eyes like his bare skin might somehow do her injury—was just about the funniest damn thing he'd come across in recent memory.
"You know," he set the cup down on the counter and took a step toward her. "I been walkin' around this here kitchen without a shirt on for the better part of ten years and ain't nobody complained yet."
"Nobody's been here to complain!"
“Sarah—”
“Don’t count!”
"Fair point." He took another step. Close enough now. He reached out and took her wrists, gently. He wasn’t pulling, only moving her hands down from her face. "Will you stop hiding if I promise to put on a shirt?"
She'd gone completely still. Her eyes, wide open now and fixed on his, had that look a green-broke horse got when it couldn't decide between bolting and standing its ground.
Her throat moved once. Her wrists under his fingers had gone rigid, but she didn't pull away or step back.
For about three seconds, Sam stood close enough to catch the soap she'd used that morning, plain lye soap cut with something, lavender maybe.
"Let me go. Please."
He released her wrists and stepped back, then picked up his shirt from where he'd left it draped over the chair. Really, living only with Sarah might have made him more brazen than he should be. He’d have to try to be kinder to Evelyn.
He put on his shirt. "We need to go into town today."
She blinked. "Town?"
"Weather's turnin'. I been watchin' them clouds all mornin' and I don't like what they're fixin' to do.
" He tucked the shirt into his trousers and pulled his suspenders up over his shoulders.
"If we get a proper storm, and I reckon we will, could be we're stuck out here a week or more.
We ain't got supplies enough for that. Flour's runnin' low, coffee's about gone, and I ain't in the habit of goin' hungry when I can help it. "
"I'm well able to make the trip on my own, if you'd rather stay and—"
"You don't know the road, you don't know the country, and you sure as hell don't know what a Montana storm looks like when it gets serious. We'll go together." He buckled his gun belt. "I'll hitch up the buckboard. Be ready in a quarter hour."
***
The ride into town took the better part of an hour, and Sam felt every minute of it in his spine.
The buckboard had no springs worth mentioning, never had, and every frozen rut in the track jolted straight up through the bench seat and into his lower back.
The wooden wheels creaked and groaned over the rough ground, and the mule's breath steamed in thick clouds that trailed back over its ears and disappeared.
Sam drove while Evelyn sat beside him on the bench with her hands in her lap and her coat buttoned to her chin.
There was about two feet of deliberate space between them, which suited him just fine.
Evelyn hadn't spoken since they'd left the homestead.
Not one word, which meant she'd gone past angry into something colder; that place where a woman stopped bothering to tell you what you'd done because she'd decided you didn't rate the effort. Sam had seen Sarah do it plenty. Always meant the same thing. You’d fouled up, and you were left on your own to figure out how.
The town sat at the end of a valley road.
There were maybe thirty buildings spread along a single main street with boardwalks running along both sides, and hitching posts every few yards.
They saw Harlow's General Store, the livery with its big double doors standing open, and the blacksmith's forge glowing orange inside.
There was the saloon, which had a painted sign that read: THE COPPER STRIKE in letters that had been peeling since before Sam arrived in the territory, the assayer's office, the sheriff's place, and a squat little church with a bell tower that leaned about two degrees east. It had been that way since Sam first rode through six years ago.
Sam pulled the buckboard up outside Harlow's and tied the mule to the hitching post. The boardwalk planks groaned under his boots as he stepped up.
The wind had picked up something fierce, and the first serious flakes had started falling, big fat ones that stuck to his coat and hat, and melted on his eyelashes.
Inside the store, the warmth from the potbelly stove hit hard.
Patent medicine bottles lined a shelf behind the counter: Dr. Hostetter's Stomach Bitters, Hamlin's Wizard Oil, and half a dozen others that promised everything short of resurrection.
Old man Harlow stood behind it all with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead and his apron dusted with flour from the barrel from which he'd been scooping.
"Sam Cooper. Ain't seen you in a dog's age. Who's this, then?"
"Friend of Sarah's. She's stayin' at the homestead a spell."
Harlow looked Evelyn over. "Welcome to the territory, miss. You come from back east?"
"Illinois, sir. Springfield."
"Springfield! Well, I'll be. That's a far piece to travel. You fixin' to stay through winter?"
"Just two weeks, Mr. Harlow. I'm minding the homestead while Miss Cooper tends to family business back east."
"Smart woman. Winter out here'll test your constitution somethin' fierce, I'll tell you that much for free."
Sam handed Harlow a list.
Flour, twenty pounds. Cornmeal, ten. Coffee beans, five pounds.
Sugar. Salt. Lard, a fresh tin. Dried beans, two kinds.
A slab of bacon. Real bacon, rather than the salt pork Sarah had left.
Canned peaches if he had them. Matches. Kerosene for the lamps.
A box of .44 cartridges for the Colt, and a box of .
44-40 for the Winchester, because a man didn't let his ammunition run low in country like this with winter coming.
Evelyn moved through the store while Harlow filled the order. She stopped at the fabric shelf, running her fingers over bolts of calico and cotton flannel, and Sam watched her do it from across the room while pretending to study a display of canned goods in which he had no interest.
She moved on without buying any fabric.
Harlow tallied the bill on a scrap of brown paper, licking the tip of his pencil between figures.
Sam paid in cash from the bounty money, counting out the coins and a few crumpled bills on the counter, and loaded everything into the buckboard while the snow thickened around them.
The flakes came faster now, smaller and harder, driven sideways by a wind that had shifted north and picked up teeth.
"We'd best get movin'." Sam checked the mule's harness, ran his hand along the traces to make sure the leather hadn't stiffened too badly in the cold. "This here's fixin' to get bad."
They loaded up and headed out.
Beside him, Evelyn drew her shawl up over her bonnet and hunched forward against the wind, her whole body curled tight for warmth. She gripped the bench edge with both hands, her knuckles gone white from cold and the effort of holding on.
"You all right over there?"
"I'm managing just fine, Mr. Cooper."
Her teeth chattered on the last word, which rather undercut the claim, but she set her jaw and faced forward and didn't complain, and he'd give her credit for that even if he wouldn't say so out loud.
The temperature dropped fast. Sam could mark it by the way the snow changed from wet and clinging to dry and fine.
It was the kind that blew like powder and didn't melt when it landed.
That meant real cold coming in behind it—below zero probably—by nightfall.
Assuming they made it home by nightfall.
The mule slowed and then stopped.
Sam flicked the reins. "Hyah. Get on, now."
The mule didn't move. It stood with its ears laid flat, and its head turned sideways against the wind, and Sam had worked with enough animals to know when one had made up its mind.
You could beat a mule that had decided it had gone far enough, and the mule would stand there and take the beating and still not move.
He climbed down from the bench, and his boots sank four inches into fresh snow that hadn't been there an hour ago.
The track had disappeared entirely. The fence posts that usually marked the road stood buried to their middles.
He could see maybe thirty yards ahead, and beyond that, there was nothing he could use—just white, everywhere, sky and ground all running together.
He looked back at Evelyn on the buckboard bench, snow collecting on her shoulders and in the folds of her shawl, her face red from the cold.
They weren't going anywhere. Not in this.
"Well, ain’t that a problem…?”