“Don’t Worry About Your Ranch…” The Obese Woman Took Charge and Saved It While He Was Sick

Chapter 5

Three days later, Orson Dawes rode up to the Thorne property in person.

Clara was on the south side of the barn, replacing a rotted board in the fence along the chicken yard. A job she had noticed needed doing and had simply started doing, the way she did everything on this property now — without asking whether she should, without making any announcement about it. She heard the horse come up the track and looked around the corner of the barn to see who it was.

She recognized Dawes from town. A thick, well-dressed man in his fifties, the kind who spent money on his appearance in a way that was supposed to communicate importance but always came across to Clara as anxiety wearing nice clothes. He rode with his chin up and his shoulders back, the posture of someone who expected to be looked at and deferred to.

He pulled up in the yard and didn’t get down from his horse.

“Thorne,” he called out. “I know you’re in there. I’d like to have a word.”

Clara watched from beside the barn. The cabin door opened and Silas came out. He was still not at full strength — he had another week or two before he would be moving the way he had moved before the illness. She could see in the set of his jaw that it cost him something to walk out and face this man when he was still not fully himself.

But he walked out steadily. He stopped at the edge of the porch. He looked up at Dawes on his horse without any particular expression on his face.

“Dawes.”

“I heard you’ve been under the weather.” Dawes’s tone had the specific quality of a man who already knew what he was going to say and had arranged his face into something resembling concern. “Wanted to come check on you myself. Neighbor to neighbor.”

“That’s thoughtful.”

“I also — ” Dawes’s eyes moved across the yard and found Clara beside the barn. Something shifted in his expression — a quick, calculating adjustment. “I see you’ve got company.”

“Miss Hartwell has been helping out while I’ve been on the mend,” Silas said. His voice was flat and clear. “She’s been invaluable.”

Dawes’s gaze stayed on Clara for a moment too long, with the particular quality of someone deciding how to use what they were looking at. Then he looked back at Silas.

“That’s generous of her. Though I have to say, Silas — a man in your position, sick, alone out here, somebody coming in every day… you don’t really know. You might want to think carefully about what she’s got access to. Your records. Your stock numbers. A man’s books are a private thing.”

Clara set down her hammer. She walked across the yard.

Dawes watched her come with the look of a man who hadn’t quite expected this particular variable to move. She stopped at the edge of the porch beside Silas and looked up at Dawes on his horse, and she said in a voice she kept completely pleasant:

“Mr. Dawes, I don’t believe we’ve been formally introduced. I’m Clara Hartwell. I run the alterations shop on Second Street.”

She paused. “I also, as it happens, know how to read a man’s books. I used to do the accounts for three different households back in Billings before I came out here. So if you’re concerned about Mr. Thorne’s financials being in capable hands, you can set that worry aside. They are.”

Dawes stared at her. Silas, beside her, said nothing, but she felt him go very still in the way that things go still right before something significant happens.

“I — that’s not — I wasn’t suggesting — ”

“Weren’t you?” Clara kept her voice light. “I apologize. I must have misread you.” She tilted her head slightly. “What were you suggesting?”

Dawes’s face had gone a particular color. “I came to make Silas an offer,” he said, and his voice had dropped some of its smoothness. “A fair offer. The same one I’ve made three times before, which he’s been too proud to take, and which I’m willing to put on the table again now that circumstances have changed.”

“Circumstances haven’t changed,” Silas said.

“You’ve been bedridden for two weeks.”

“And now I’m not. And my property is in better shape than it was before I got sick, because Miss Hartwell found problems I hadn’t gotten to and fixed them.” He looked at Dawes with the particular clarity of a man who had made up his mind. “I’m not selling. Not a single acre. Not to you. Not now. Not the next time you ride up here with a fair offer. Not the time after that.”

He stepped forward. “We’re done with this conversation.”

Dawes looked from Silas to Clara and back to Silas. The calculation in his eyes was no longer making any effort to hide itself.

“You’re making a mistake,” he said. “You’re a sick man who got lucky that some woman decided to take an interest. That luck isn’t going to hold. This land is too much for one person alone, and you know it. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to face that.”

“When I do,” Silas said, “you’ll be the last person I call.”

Dawes held his gaze for a moment. Then he turned his horse and rode back down the track without another word.

The yard went quiet. Clara became aware slowly that her heart was beating faster than she would have liked, and that her hands were entirely steady — which she was grateful for, because she had needed them to be steady, and they had been.

Silas stood on the porch and watched Dawes ride out until he was gone from sight.

“He’s not done,” Clara said.

“No,” Silas agreed. “He’s not.”

“He’s going to go back to town and make this worse.”

Silas turned to look at her. His eyes held something heavy in them — not guilt exactly, but responsibility. The awareness of having drawn someone into something.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This isn’t what you signed up for.”

“I didn’t sign up for anything,” Clara said. “I stopped because your horses were crying. Everything else is just what came next.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “Clara,” he said, and then he stopped. She waited. She watched him work through whatever it was he was trying to find the words for, watched the effort of it move across his face.

“I want you to know that I see what you’ve done here,” he said finally. “Not just the fence and the cattle and the cooking. All of it.” He paused. “I see it.”

Clara held his gaze. “Thank you,” she said quietly.

“I’m not good at saying more than that. Not yet.” He looked away. “But I wanted you to know it’s registered. All of it. What you are.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. She turned back to the fence and let the silence sit between them. It was not an uncomfortable silence. It was the kind that holds something in it, something that keeps its shape.