“No, that’s true,” Ada said.  “It would have been terrible to laugh.  But it was funny.”

“He’s not Miller Dawson is what you’re saying.”

“No,” Ada said slowly, “he’s not Miller Dawson.”

“There’s different people coming and going every day,” Brewster said.  “Because of so many wagon trains and this is right before the mountains.”

“Some of them leave everything they’ve got.  Wagons, cookstoves, brass beds, rocking chairs.”

“Because the mountains are hard.”

Charlotte stared at them both in amazement.

“They need to sell their cattle too, sometimes, and sheep and milk cows,” Ada said.  “We bought a milk cow.”

“What?”

“We had Pa’s money.  Brewster and me talked about it, it seemed like a milk cow was a good investment.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” Brewster said.

Charlotte rested her chin on Grace’s head.  “Probably the best investment anyone could think of.”

“Ma was worried for the baby that we didn’t have one.”

“That’s why we did it,” Brewster said and the silence was there again.

“I have a churn,” Charlotte offered.  Why her father had included a churn when she herself didn’t have a milk cow was a question beyond answering.  “We’ll make cheese.  We’ll have cream.  We’ll have butter.”  Butter brought back the crawfish and those brought back his face, his hands.

“Is it in the stables?”

“Along with our horse.”

“You have a horse?”  Charlotte felt like she had to keep rearranging her expectations every time one of them spoke.

“The wagon train people took the team because they needed it, but we kept the riding horse.”

“It’s the one we’d had since ever we could remember.”

“Cairo,” Ada said.

“That’s the name of your horse?  Cairo?”

“Pa said it was the most ordinary horse he’d ever seen so it needed a fancy name.  He told us Cairo was in Egypt, and Egypt was in Africa, and Africa was so far away he could hardly stand to think about it.”

Charlotte mourned for the people who’d imparted so much good to these children.

“Now I want to know about the missionary lady.”  She watched their faces grow serious.

“Miller and some of the women took us there,” Ada said.  “They’d talked to her and she agreed to keep us.”

“But she already had other orphans.”

“And she said small children were too much trouble.  She said she didn’t want Grace.”

“So she tried to give Grace back.”

“Miller started yelling.  Then the women joined together for a talk and we stayed, Grace stayed, and then they rode off but I don’t think Miller wanted to.”

“There were Indians,” Jeremy said.  Charlotte began to see that these two subjects were very dear to his heart, Indians and horses.