Scully stopped in the middle of the room, his sun-streaked hair full of snow and his ears red with the cold. Something in the way he looked at Evangeline made her heart beat a little faster, and her smile felt unsteady on her face, as if it might fall off and shatter at her feet.

“The filly’s name is Sugarplum,” Abigail announced. “And next spring she’s getting brand-new shoes. Scully said so.”

Evangeline found her tongue, which had a habit, it seemed, of getting lost whenever she was around Scully. “Did he, now?” she asked mildly.

Scully set Abigail down and looked around as he shed his coat. “The place looks real nice,” he remarked. “Smells good, too.”

They were simple compliments, things anyone might have said, in passing, meaning little or nothing by them. Why, then, did they make Evangeline feel as though she’d just raced down a steep hillside on a runaway sled?

CHAPTER

4

LATER THAT NIGHT, when Abigail was sleeping in the large bed under the shuttered window, Evangeline and Scully sat at the table, which Scully had dragged closer to the fire. A kerosene lantern shone between them; Evangeline had been reading silently from one of her volumes of poetry while Scully worked and reworked a column of figures, using a scrap of brown paper and a stubby pencil. Outside, the night creatures sang their usual chorus, at once soothing and unsettling.

At last, Scully laid the pencil down and caught Evangeline’s gaze in that uncanny way he had, like a scarecrow stretching out a hand to capture a bird in mid-flight. “You know I have to leave, don’t you? Take the mules and the sleigh back to Jacob?”

She had kept the knowledge corraled at the back of her mind, but of course it came as no surprise. She and Abigail could wait for him here, or make the journey with him. Neither option was particularly appealing, but it would have to be one or the other. “Yes,” she said, somewhat lamely. “I know.”

“Have you ever fired a gun?”

They were to be left behind, then, she and Abigail. It made more sense, she supposed, than risking the trip—they would undoubtedly slow Scully down into the bargain—but it gave her a sorrowful feeling to think of him leaving. “I used to shoot at foxes when they bothered the chickens,” she said. “I never tried to hit one, though.”

He grinned. “The same method will usually work with Indians, bobcats and wolves,” he assured her.

She smiled back at him, couldn’t help it, and never mind the fact that she was terrified of being alone on that ranch with her daughter, the wilderness looming all around them like some sentient but ruthless beast with thunder for a heartbeat, water and slush for blood, and the night wind for breath. She’d been frightened a great many times in her life, especially after the war had begun, and she’d learned to keep moving forward, though no less afraid.