All 9 Children Nobody Wanted Found a Father When a Cowboy Said: They’re Mine Now Forever!

Chapter 3

Greeley barely heard him. He was already ticking down the row with the ledger, doing the sums in his head, and the sums were not coming out right. “The Hendershaw place will only take the two boys. The home down at Asheford has room for three more. And the rest — ” he stopped, and rubbed his eyes with the heel of a stained hand ” — the rest I haven’t sorted yet.”

“How many places are you splitting them between?”

“Four, maybe five.” Greeley said it without relish, the way a man passes along a death sentence he had no hand in writing. “It isn’t what I’d choose, Mr. Hart. Nine children. There isn’t a soul in three counties with room enough or means enough to take nine at once.”

And here is where Elias Hart might have nodded, and stepped aside, and ridden on to his half-built barn, and lived out the rest of his quiet life never knowing what he had walked past. The whole story turned on the next thing he said. Every one of those children would remember it for the rest of their lives. Even the baby, who was too young to hold a memory, would be told it so many times that it became a memory anyway, worn smooth as a river stone from the retelling.

But Elias did not say it yet. First he let Greeley finish counting them, and something in the ledger man’s voice cracked him open along an old seam.

He learned the whole of it in pieces over the following minutes — Ruth Whitlow had spent the last eleven years taking in children the territory had no use for. The infant left on the church step in a basket. The two brothers whose father had walked west one morning and never written a line to say where. The little girl found asleep in the back of an empty wagon at the edge of a cattle drive, a girl no one could name and no one would claim, so Ruth had given her one.

One by one they had come to her small house at the end of Juniper Falls. One by one she had fed them, nursed them through their fevers, taught them their letters at a table too small for the purpose, and called them hers. And then on a Tuesday morning she had not come down to start the fire, and the oldest boy, Jesse, had gone up and found her gone, and the whole careful world she had built came apart in the space of an afternoon.

“Tell me their names,” Elias said, and there was something in the way he said it that made Greeley look at him properly for the first time.

The county agent sighed and opened the ledger, and the names came out flat and official, each one read off like a tally mark. “Jesse, twelve. Nell, eleven. Ben, nine. Tess, eight. Dolly, seven. Micah and Malachi, twins, six. Lottie, five.” He closed the book. “And the little one there, in the puddle — Iris. Going on two. Doesn’t talk much. Ruth always said she understands everything, though.”

Elias looked down the row of faces. He was not a man given to sudden feelings, and what was rising in him now did not feel sudden at all. It felt like something that had been waiting a long time for the door to open.

“How long,” he said slowly, “until you’ve got them sorted?”

“The coach comes at dusk. I’d have them parceled out by nightfall if I could find the places.”

“And if you can’t?”

Greeley laughed, a short, humorless sound. “Then they sleep in the courthouse, Mr. Hart, and we start again in the morning with a fresh ledger and a fresh headache.”

The rain drummed on the roof of the porch. Elias Hart looked at the row of wet, waiting children. Then he looked at Mr. Greeley. And he opened his mouth, not knowing until the words were already in the air that he had decided anything at all.

“I’ve got room,” he said.