Evangeline gasped with delight. “So do I,” she said, pushing on his shoulders. “But I want an apology from you, Scully.”

He lifted his head. “Why?”

“Because you should have said good-bye, no matter how hard it would have been. You owed us that. You owed it to yourself.”

Scully let his forehead rest against hers and sighed. “You’re right, as usual. I was a coward. Can you forgive me?”

She pretended to consider the question. “I suppose,” she replied, in a prim voice. “If you promise to dig a well close to the house before you do anything else.”

He laughed. “Anything else?” he teased.

She wrapped her arms around his lean waist. “Well,” she said, “almost anything else.”

* * *

Come the morning, the bride and groom rose early, in order to get a good start for home. Abigail was still asleep; Evangeline meant to wake her to say farewell, even though she’d already explained to the child how she and Scully would be going ahead to the ranch, while she and Hortense would follow in a few days, with Big John and Tessa.

The Keatings were at the table, as it happened, side by side on the long bench, tucking into breakfast, while Jacob sat across from them, his hands folded before him, almost as though he were praying.

“There’s more and more families comin’ in all the time,” he was saying. “I reckon this place is going to turn itself into a town before we know it.”

Evangeline and Tessa exchanged cordial smiles.

“You and Scully set yourselves down,” June-bug said, shooing them in the direction of the table. “You’ll need a good hot meal to sustain you all that way.” Having said that, she immediately delved into the flow of conversation. “It’s a shame, that’s what it is. A saloon! Here we ain’t even got a school or a church, and Trey Hargreaves means to build him a saloon!”

“Now, June-bug,” Jacob chided moderately. “This land belongs to the stage line. If they want to sell off parcels of it, for any legal use, they’ve got the right.”

June-bug fluttered a hand in dismissal. “Nonsense. Somebody ought to talk to that man. Here he’s got that sweet daughter, as much in need of a Christian education as any child ever was, poor motherless little thing, and what’s he doin’? Is he buildin’ a church or gettin’ a real teacher in here? Oh, no. Not Trey Hargreaves. He wants a saloon instead. If that ain’t typical!”

Scully tossed a sympathetic grin in Jacob’s direction. Once Evangeline had seated herself at the table, he stepped over and sat down beside her. “You’d better look out, old man,” he said to the stationmaster, a grin lurking in his eyes. “This woman of yours is going to take matters into her own hands one of these days and build the town to suit herself.”

Evangeline elbowed her husband.

Jacob’s slow, rare grin was something to see. “No sense tryin’ to close the gate,” he remarked, “once the horse has made a run for the tall timber.”