Scully grinned his imp’s grin; there was no trace of the angel in him now. “Most folks think St. Nick rides a white horse—I tell it that way myself—or walks with a staff in one hand. But sometimes he drives a peddler’s wagon, pulled by a sorry old mule.”

Calvin T. Murdoch, of course. Scully had bought the ribbons and candy and Evangeline’s beautiful present way back when the peddler came through, and saved them all this while.

“You are an amazing man,” Evangeline said.

The grin was even more wicked than before. “So they say,” he agreed, without a trace of modesty. “So they say.”

CHAPTER

13

ONCE CHRISTMAS was over, it seemed to Evangeline that the nature of time itself changed; it moved faster and faster, like a great round stone tumbling down a steep hillside.

January was bitterly cold and brought mountains of snow and laced the eaves with sparkling icicles. February, its close cousin, was carved out of blue-white ice. Evangeline could walk on the surface of the spring-fed pond, and on those occasions when she went to fetch water, a task that usually fell to Scully, following the incident with the black wolf, she had to use the butt of his rifle to break through even the thinnest places. She never ranged farther than the barn or the privy without that rifle, though she saw neither animal nor Indian during that hasty rush of days and nights.

By March, the thaw was beginning; there was an awakening in the living earth, a stirring, detected by the spirit rather than the senses, beneath the deep snow and hard ground. Rivulets of water trickled through the ice on the pond.

Abigail had regained her strength by that time, and she was so far ahead in her lessons that Evangeline despaired of giving her daughter a proper education, in view of her own inadequacies. More advanced reading and arithmetic primers were needed, not to mention maps for geography and perhaps a volume of simple astronomy, and the child’s energy grew more frenetic every day. Abigail was weary of spending the majority of her time inside the house, and Evangeline certainly didn’t blame her for it; she had cabin fever herself.

Only Scully roamed the woods and plains and timbered hillsides without trepidation, he of the arrow-pierced coat and shoulder, hunting game for the table and seeking mustangs to add to his small but growing herd. He brought home rabbits, fowl and, once, a deer, kept up the more difficult chores, and held Evangeline at a greater and greater distance. He seemed to believe that, as long as he ignored her, neither she nor their dilemma could exist.

Very often, even when they were sitting side by side before the fire of a night, it struck her that he had already gone away, that the man she saw before her was really a mere reflection, an impression left in the ether like a fingerprint on glass.