Chapter Sixteen #2
Foster held his gaze for a long moment while the coffee cooled between his hands, then stood up from the bar.
"I'll have my men ready come fair day. If you spot Wilkes, you come to me first. You hear me? First. Not after. Not durin'. Before you do a single blessed thing, you come find me."
"I hear you, Sheriff."
"Lord above, I hope you do."
Foster left. Sam stayed at the bar long enough to finish the whiskey, then paid Mack and walked out into the cold.
***
The ride home took an hour in the dark, the mare picking her way along the frozen track by starlight and habit. Sam let her choose the pace because his mind had left the road about two miles back.
Wilkes had come to Montana. Wilkes had found the valley, found the homestead, found Sam.
Whether by coincidence or by intention, the man who'd killed Sam's parents had surfaced within five miles of the home Sam had built for Sarah, the home where Evelyn Granger slept in the loft and sewed scarves at the kitchen table and made pie.
The two halves of Sam's life, the hunt and the home, had collided on his own land, at his own fence line, in a conversation with a woman he'd told to go back to her sewing because he couldn't bring himself to tell her the truth.
Coward, she'd called him. The bravest man she'd ever met, and a coward right down to the bone. She'd been right about both parts.
He reached the homestead past midnight. The barn work went quick in the dark.
He unsaddled the mare by lantern light, gave her water, forked hay into the stall.
He crossed the yard to the house with the Winchester in one hand and the lantern in the other, let himself in through the front door, and latched it behind him.
The kitchen lay dim, the cookstove burned down to coals, a single lamp guttering low on the table.
Evelyn sat at the sewing table with her head on her folded arms, asleep.
Fabric surrounded her, cut flannel and half-stitched scarves, a pair of gloves with only three fingers finished.
The blue ribbon lay spooled beside her elbow, partially unraveled.
A cup of tea sat at her right hand, long since gone cold.
She'd worked until she dropped. Stayed up past midnight stitching scarves for Mrs. Montgomery's debt, fighting a battle with needle and thread because a man with a gun had refused to let her fight any other way.
She'd kept working after he'd slammed the door and called her Miss Granger and ridden off without a word of explanation or apology, because Evelyn Granger responded to being shut out by working harder, the way Sam responded to being shut out by riding harder.
He set the Winchester against the wall and stood there looking at her for longer than served any practical purpose.
Her hair had come loose from its pins, falling across her folded arms. Her breathing came slow and even.
A smudge of blue dye from the ribbon marked her left cheek where she'd rested it against the fabric.
He should wake her. Tell her to go upstairs. Keep the distance he'd put between them, the distance she deserved after what he'd said; the distance required by the poster in his coat pocket.
He crossed the room instead, crouched beside her chair, and gathered her up the way he'd done before, arm under her knees, arm behind her back. She stirred but didn't wake, turning her face into his shoulder while her breath warmed his neck through the collar of his shirt.
He carried her up the stairs, slowly because the stairs creaked and to move fast would jostle her.
He laid her on the bed in the loft. He pulled the quilt up over her shoulders, tucking it along her side the way Sarah used to tuck quilts when she was small enough to need tucking, and he stepped back.
The blue dye smudge still marked her cheek. He could have wiped it off. His thumb could have reached it from where he stood. He kept his hands at his sides.
He went downstairs and banked the fire, then checked the door, then checked the windows. He pulled the bounty poster from his coat, unfolded it on the kitchen table, smoothed the creases flat, and studied the face of Amos Wilkes by the light of the dying lamp.
Angular jaw. Broken nose. Dark eyes. The face of the man who'd burned his parents alive twenty years ago, rendered in fresh ink on clean paper, staring up at him from his own kitchen table.
The house he'd built to keep Sarah safe.
The house where he now housed a woman from Illinois who called him a coward and meant it as a compliment, who had blue dye on her cheek from sewing scarves for a neighbor's debt.
He folded the poster, put it back in his coat, went to his room, and lay down in the dark.
Wilkes occupied one half of his mind. Evelyn occupied the other.
The two halves pressed against each other because Wilkes circled the property where Evelyn slept, and the fair where Evelyn would sell her scarves sat two days away in a town where Wilkes had been spotted.
Every choice Sam made about one of them now affected the other.
Keeping Evelyn safe meant catching Wilkes.
Catching Wilkes meant involving Evelyn in the danger he'd spent two weeks trying to keep from her.
The circle closed on itself and left no exit he could find.
Coward, she'd called him.