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

Chapter 8

Spring did not bring an end to their troubles. It brought a new one.

The twins were six years old and afraid of nothing, which was the whole of the problem. One March afternoon, with the snow gone and the mud deep, Micah and Malachi decided that the bay mare in the far pasture was in trouble — she was, in fact, simply standing in the sun — and that it was their job to rescue her. They slipped out of the yard while Elias was mending fence, and by the time he noticed the silence, they were gone.

The searching took until dark.

He found them at the edge of the timber, in a hollow beneath an old cottonwood, wrapped around each other under a blanket of leaves, soaked and shivering and smiling up at him like they had done something wonderful. The rain that had started in the afternoon had turned to sleet, and their lips were blue, and Elias’s heart came up into his throat and stayed there.

He carried them back one at a time, bundled them in blankets by the fire, and sent Jesse for the doctor on the best horse in the barn. By midnight they were burning with fever, and the doctor, a brisk woman with steady hands, said the word that Elias had been dreading in his chest for ten years.

“She’s not in danger of losing them,” she said, “if we keep them warm and their fevers break. But you, Mr. Hart — you’ll need to stay up. Both of them, through the night. Can you manage?”

“Manage,” he said.

He sat between their beds with the fire high, wiping their foreheads with a cloth, talking to them in a low voice that did not sound like his own. He told them about the mare they had meant to rescue. He told them about the cottonwood by the creek where the first lambs came. He told them about the way the land looked in the morning when the frost was still on it, the same land he had shown them from the wagon on the first day, and he watched their breathing and held their hands and did not once look away.

And somewhere in the small hours, the schoolteacher arrived.

Her name was Mara Easton. She was a widow, forty-one years old, with a kind face and iron patience, and she had heard the doctor’s account at the crossroads and come out through the mud with a basket of broth and a tin of liniment because she could not sleep knowing nine children were in the house with one exhausted man. She did not make a fuss. She set the basket down, took the cloth from his hand, and said, “You’ll sleep now. I’ll take the next watch.”

He slept. He did not mean to. He was asleep before he could argue.

When he woke, the gray light of morning was in the window, and the fevers had broken. The twins were sleeping pink and peaceful, their hands tangled together on the same blanket. And Mara Easton was asleep in the chair by the fire, her head resting on her arm, the cloth still in her hand, her hair coming loose from its pins in a way she would have been mortified to know.

Elias sat up very slowly, and he looked at her for a long time.

He did not know, sitting there in the gray morning, that this woman would one day sit at the head of his long table. He did not know that she would carry his children’s fevers and their tears and their questions in her careful hands, or that she would be the reason Nell ever learned to be proud of her quick mind instead of afraid of it. He did not know any of it yet.

But the looking had begun. And the looking, he would learn, was where everything else started.