“Get In My Wagon Now.” Rich Cowboy Found Injured Dog In Blizzard—What Happened Next Shocked Everyone

Chapter 4

Her name was Abigail, and I had not seen her face in four years.

The photograph was worn at the edges, carried close to someone’s heart, and it showed a young woman of twenty-five with dark hair and dark eyes I would have known in a crowd of ten thousand. She was holding a small boy — three years old, maybe — who shared her delicate features and her dark coloring. They were both smiling at the camera with the kind of unguarded joy that makes a man ache.

The boy had my eyes. I saw it immediately, the way you see yourself in a window you weren’t expecting. He had my eyes, and his name was Emmett, and I had never met him.

Vance’s voice came from very far away. “Mr. Callahan? What is it? What’s in that picture?”

I couldn’t answer. There was a folded piece of paper beneath the photograph, and I knew the handwriting on it the way I knew my own brand. I had watched that handwriting grow from a child’s wobbling letters into a woman’s firm, beautiful hand. I had held letters in that hand that I had never been able to answer.

Which was the whole problem, wasn’t it.

The letter began: My dearest Papa.

I had to stop. I had to put the paper down and breathe, because those three words had not been said to me in four years, and I had convinced myself I would never hear them again.

I know you may never forgive me for the things I said when I left. I know I have no right to ask for your help after all these years of silence. But I am desperate, Papa, and you are the only person in the world who might be able to save us.

I remembered the last argument. God, I remembered it. Abigail was twenty-one, standing in the doorway of this very house with her carpetbag in her hands, her chin up, her eyes bright with defiance. She was going to marry Warren Blake — a charming drifter with a handsome face and a silver tongue, a man I had investigated and found debts, failed businesses, and a long, cold habit of using women to pay his way through life.

I had told her so. I had laid out every fact I’d uncovered, and she had looked at me with those dark eyes and said the words I’d spent four years trying to forget.

You don’t know how to love anything, Papa. You never learned. You’d rather lose a daughter than admit you were wrong.

She’d been right and wrong in equal measure, and that was the worst part. I had loved her with a ferocity that choked me, and I had never once known how to show it. Every instinct I had was practical — providing, protecting, planning — and she had read every one of it as coldness. When she walked out that door with Warren Blake, I told myself she would learn her lesson and come home. I told myself pride was a reasonable price to pay for being right.

Four years. Four years of silence. And I had been too stubborn to break it.

The letter continued, and my hands began to shake.

The man I married is not the person I thought he was. Warren seemed kind and gentle when we met, but after our wedding, he changed. He became cruel. Violent. I have tried to protect little Emmett, Papa. I named him for you, and I fear for both our lives.

Warren has gambling debts that have brought dangerous men to our door. He speaks constantly of selling everything we own and disappearing before his creditors find him. We are living in a cabin near Deadwood. I have saved a small amount of money, but it would not last long if we were forced to run.

I am writing this in secret, Papa. I am writing it in the middle of the night by candlelight, and I pray that somehow it will reach you and that you will find it in your heart to forgive a foolish daughter who finally understands the value of her father’s love.

By the time I finished, I was on my knees in front of the fireplace, and the letter was shaking so hard in my hands I could barely read the last lines. Dr. Whitman had his hand on my shoulder. Vance was standing very still, watching me with a face I couldn’t read.

The final paragraphs explained the dog.

Abigail had befriended a man named Cole Mercer — a bounty hunter who had been tracking Warren for his unpaid debts. Mercer had agreed to carry the letter two hundred miles to the Callahan Ranch, and he had trained his dog to find us, in case he encountered trouble on the journey. The dog knew the ranch by scent and by instruction. The dog had been sent ahead.

Papa, if you are reading this, it may already be too late. Warren is talking about leaving in the next few days. He has a buyer for the cabin, and he has been cruel to Emmett in ways I cannot bear to write. Please. Please come.

I read the letter again. Then I read it a third time.

Four years. My daughter had been dying by inches in a cabin near Deadwood, and I had been sitting here counting cattle and congratulating myself on my discipline.

The dog — Duke, his name was stitched inside the collar, in the same careful hand I’d come to recognize — lifted his head and looked at me with those patient eyes. And I understood, finally, what he’d been trying to tell me since the moment I pulled him out of the snow.

He hadn’t been lost.

He’d been looking for me.