Evangeline didn’t try to hide her feelings, not from June-bug, her only friend now that she was so far from Rachel and the others, back home in Pennsylvania. The fact that Abigail was on the other side of the room, standing on tiptoe and peering out the window for the same stagecoach Jacob was expecting, enabled her to speak frankly.

“I didn’t know it was possible to feel the way I do about Scully. Nothing could have prepared me for it.”

June-bug took both her hands and squeezed. There was no judgment in her kindly face, only concern and sorrow. “Oh, darlin’,” she said. “Darlin’.” They changed nothing, those ordinary words, and yet they consoled Evangeline a little. Just having someone to know, someone to tell. Someone to care.

“Scully’s leaving,” Evangeline went on miserably, after she and June-bug were seated, side by side, on one of the benches that lined the dining tables. “He’s going to sell his share of the ranch and the cattle to Big John and head out right away.”

“I reckon that’s the best thing to do,” June-bug said sadly. “Still, it’s cause for heartbreak, right enough.”

That it was, and Evangeline had the broken heart to prove it.

The following day, around dinner time, Scully returned. One of Big John’s men had ridden in while he was on the ranch, he said, and he’d stayed behind to look out for the stock. According to the visitor, Big John, the drovers, and a herd of a thousand cattle were less than a week behind him.

A week, Evangeline thought, despairing.

* * *

Only five days had passed, days during which Evangeline kept herself busy helping June-bug cook for the stage passengers, coming through with regularity now, when the first sign of the herd appeared on the horizon. Scully, in the meanwhile, had sold his captured horses to Jacob and helped with the outside work, avoiding Evangeline as much as he could. Whatever time he had to spare, he spent hunting.

It made her feel utterly bereft, all of it, though she knew kindness and attention from Scully would probably have made things worse, not better.

For all that the ground was still muddy and the heat of summer was long weeks away, the approaching cattle raised dust in great, rolling, sky-swallowing clouds. They shook the ground, the way Jacob said the buffaloes used to do, back in the good old days when the animals were still plentiful, and their bawling could be heard from a distance of several miles.

Evangeline braced herself for the arrival of the man she had solemnly promised to marry. Abigail, apparently never suspecting that accepting Big John meant losing Scully, was beside herself with excitement. She couldn’t wait to see the cattle up close, and asked Scully a dozen times, if she asked him once, if he thought Big John would let her ride one of them.

Scully’s quiet “no,” oft-repeated though it was, did not seem to diminish her enthusiasm.