A Cowboy Found His Mail-Order Bride Hurt and Silent — The Note Beside Her Told a Shocking Truth

Chapter 10

It took forty minutes to get ready, because Ruth could not find one of her boots, which had ended up under the bed next to the chamber pot for reasons Ruth was unable to explain and unwilling to speculate about. Abigail found it without comment and put it on her sister’s foot with the practiced efficiency of someone who had located Ruth’s boots in unlikely places many times before.

They came out to the wagon in a line: Margaret first, then Abigail, then Ruth hopping the last porch step with both feet together, the way she always did, apparently for the pleasure of it.

The road was hard-packed snow over ice, and Silas took it steady. Beside him, Margaret sat straight with her hands in her lap and said very little, which he was learning to read as a form of preparation rather than fear. She got ready quietly, and then she did the thing, and she did not waste words on the middle part. Abigail sat behind them with Ruth in her lap, one arm around her sister, and Ruth rode with her face tipped up, watching the sky.

“Are there birds in the winter?” Ruth asked.

“Some,” Silas said. “Not as many.”

“Where do the others go?”

“South. Warmer weather.”

“Why don’t we do that?”

“Cattle can’t fly,” Silas said.

Ruth considered this with great seriousness. “If they could, would you go south?”

“If they could — I reckon we’d all go south.”

Ruth nodded, satisfied, and went back to watching the sky. Behind him, Silas heard Abigail make a sound he was fairly certain was the beginning of a laugh that she converted at the last moment into a cough, and Margaret beside him pressed her lips together in that way she had.

The clerk at the territorial office was a young man named Garrett, new enough to the job that he hadn’t yet developed the practiced indifference of his predecessor, and he looked genuinely pleased to be processing something that wasn’t a land dispute. He filled out the form in careful handwriting, slid it across the counter, looked at Silas, then at Margaret, and said, “Congratulations, I suppose.”

“You suppose right,” Silas said.

Judge Warren was in his office above the land registry, which was unusual — the judge made his rounds, and was more often elsewhere than in Willow Creek — but the cold had kept him in. He opened the door in his shirtsleeves with a pen in his hand, took in the four of them on his landing with mild surprise, and looked at the license, at Margaret, at the two girls behind her. He stepped back from the door.

“Come in, then.”

The ceremony took eight minutes. Warren read the words from the book he’d been using for thirty years — the same words he’d used for ranchers and miners and merchants and their wives, the words the law required, and that meant what they said when the people saying them intended them to mean it.

“Do you, Silas Matthew Kane, take this woman?”

He looked at Margaret when he said, “I do.” Not at the judge, not at the book — at her. She was looking back at him the same way she’d looked at him across Mrs. Remick’s table: measuring, but with something different in it now. Something that was measuring and finding, rather than measuring and waiting.

“Do you, Margaret Elinore Rowan, take this man?”

She said, “I do,” in the steady teacher’s voice that didn’t waver.

And then Warren said something about husband and wife, and signed the certificate, and slid it across his desk, and shook Silas’s hand. “You can kiss your wife, if you’re inclined.”

Silas looked at Margaret. She looked at him. There was a half-second that held more than half-seconds usually hold. He leaned down and kissed her — brief and careful — and her hand came up and held his arm for just a moment, and that moment was enough.

“I kissed Mama,” Ruth announced to the room, “on her cheek this morning, before you did.”

Warren looked at her gravely. “Noted.”

“So I was first,” she said.

“You were first,” Silas confirmed.

She looked satisfied and went back to investigating the judge’s bookshelf with her hands behind her back, in the manner of someone who has been told many times not to touch things and has developed a workaround.

Abigail was standing by the window. She had watched the whole ceremony with those careful eyes, and now she was looking at Silas in a way that was different from the way she’d looked at him before — not the measuring look, not the guarded look. Something that had set down some of its weight.

He crossed the room to her and crouched down so he was at her level.

“You all right?”

She looked at him for a moment. Then, very quietly, so only he could hear: “My father used to tell us he loved us. Every time, before it got bad, he would say it first.” She paused. “I don’t need you to say it. I just need you to keep doing what you’ve been doing.”

“That I can do,” he said. “Every day. You can hold me to it.”

She nodded once — the same nod he used himself — and looked back out the window.

It was on the way out, on the landing above the street, that they saw him: brown coat, medium build, standing across the street with his hands in his pockets, not pretending to be there for any other reason. He was looking up at them, and he wore the smile Abigail had described — the kind that occupied only the lower half of a face.

Margaret stopped on the landing. Silas felt her go still beside him, that deep-wired stillness, the old reflex. He put his hand over hers on his arm.

She looked down at it. Then she looked back up at the man across the street.

“Gideon,” she said. Not loud. Just naming him.

Gideon Rowan looked at Silas’s hand over hers, looked at the marriage certificate in Margaret’s hand. Something moved through his face — not defeat, not yet, but the recognition of a man who has arrived at the table and found the cards already dealt.

Silas looked at him across the frozen street with the flat, steady look he’d used on Hollis Mercer — the one that didn’t need volume or movement to carry its weight. Gideon Rowan held the look for five seconds. Then he turned and walked back toward the hotel.

Ruth, who had been watching with her chin at railing level, said, “Who was that man?”

“Nobody important,” Abigail said beside her.

Silas looked at Margaret. She was still watching the place where Gideon had been, her jaw set, her hands steady on his arm now rather than rigid. Working through something. Letting something settle. Then she looked up at him.

“He’ll try something else,” she said.

“Probably.”

“Are you ready for that?”

He looked at this woman — who had written the truth on a piece of paper and handed it to a stranger, and climbed onto a wagon in a Wyoming blizzard with her two daughters, and faced everything that came at her with her chin level, her hands steady, her eyes open.

“Are you?” he said.

She looked at him for a moment. Then something in her face shifted — not the armor, not the calculation, but something underneath all of that, something that had been waiting a long time for ground solid enough to stand on.

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

Abigail took Ruth’s hand at the top of the landing steps. “Come on,” she said to her sister. “Watch the ice.”

They went down together, and Silas and Margaret followed, and behind them the door to Warren’s office clicked shut. The marriage certificate was in Margaret’s hand, and the street was cold and white, and Gideon Rowan was not on it anymore.

Silas untied Ranger from the rail and helped Margaret up to the wagon seat, and she took his hand this time without the half-second of hesitation. The grip was the same — strong, cold, certain — but different now in the way that everything was different now. Not in what it was, but in what it meant.

“Mr. Horseman,” Ruth said from the back.

Silas looked back at her. “Yeah.”

“Is it far home?”

He looked at this six-year-old girl with her mother’s eyes and her wild hair and her magnificent, uncomplicated certainty about how the world should work — and he felt the thing again, the warm weight. And this time he had a name for it.

“Forty minutes,” he said. “In good weather.”

“Is it good weather?”

He looked at the sky — cold and flat and white, holding more snow behind it the way Wyoming winters did, keeping something in reserve, just to remind you who was in charge out here.

“Good enough,” he said.