“I can’t believe that,” he answered. “You’re a handsome woman. There must have been somebody who wanted to marry you.”

She thought of Mott, of his big, grimy hands, his greedy eyes, his mean spirit. “There was one,” she confessed.

“And this fellow was so bad that you’re rather travel a couple of thousand miles and get hitched to a stranger than take him for a husband? He must be a real piece of work.”

Mott was a sour man, for all that he was barely thirty and should have been in the prime of his life. He made Evangeline think of the vinegar-soaked sponge the Roman soldiers had offered to Jesus, during the Crucifixion. “Something poisoned him,” she answered. “I don’t know what.”

Scully accepted that and got up, headed for the door, took down his coat and the rifle. The pistol he’d worn earlier lay within easy reach of where he stood, on the shelf above the row of pegs, but he left it where it was. “I’ll have a last look around,” he said. “If you need—” He paused, reddened. “If you need to visit the privy, I could see you safely down the path.”

Evangeline shook her head. She hated using the chamber pot, which Scully had been gentleman enough to empty for her earlier that day, but she wasn’t ready to face the darkness, the cold, and the things that might be lurking.

“I want to twiddle,” Abigail announced sleepily, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

Scully cleared his throat and waited, being very careful not to look at either Evangeline or her daughter.

“All right,” Evangeline said with a sigh. She put on her cloak, wrapped Abigail up tightly in a spare quilt, and followed Scully out into the still and frigid night. There was a crisp aspect to the air, portending more snow, though the sky was clear and spattered with stars.

Scully waited politely while his charges attended to business, then squired them back to the cabin without a word. While he was in the barn, tending the livestock, Evangeline consoled herself, in her abject embarrassment, with the prospect of the hot baths she and Abigail could enjoy during his absence.

She was absorbed in her letter to Rachel when he returned; he performed some ablutions at the wash-stand, flung the water outside, said a quiet good night, and vanished into the lean-to. Evangeline felt an unseemly curiosity about that little room, and decided she would go in and get a sense of the place, when Scully was well away.

After describing the westward journey to Rachel in considerable detail on precious paper brought from home, including the fact that one Scully Wainwright had come to fetch her at the Springwater station, in her future husband’s stead, she sealed the letter into an envelope, entered the address in her careful, sturdy handwriting. Rachel, once engaged to marry a young man who died horribly at Vicksburg, now boarded with a local farm family and longed to see more of the world than she had. She’d been envious of what she called Evangeline’s Grand Adventure, although many of the other women in the community, farmers’ wives mostly, had thought it would be infinitely wiser to marry Mott Keating and stay right where she was.