“Yes, Mama,” came the whispered answer. “Yes.”

The kitten made a circle around the Indian’s right ankle, then came bounding back, past Evangeline, to Abigail.

Evangeline got the bucket, three-quarters full of milk, and held it out. “You can take this,” she said. If the man could not understand her words, he recognized her gesture. After a moment’s hesitation, he accepted the bucket and stepped back to let Evangeline pass.

She kept him in front of her and they proceeded to the chicken coop, where Evangeline presented him with the four eggs she found there, as well as one of the hens. He put the eggs into a leather pouch and carried the squawking fowl upside down, by its feet.

They advanced toward the house. The Indian, probably a Chippewa like the ones they’d encountered on the trail between the Springwater station and the ranch, waited in the dooryard. When Evangeline came outside again, carrying a thick quilt and, of course, the rifle, an eery silence had fallen. She realized, with a shiver, that he’d wrung the chicken’s neck. It was not necessarily a cruel action—he must have done it very swiftly—but it unnerved her even more, all the same.

“You’d better go now,” Evangeline said, when she’d handed over the quilt.

The Indian carried everything gratefully, including the bucket with the fresh milk sloshing inside. She went back into the cabin on an afterthought, selected a chipped crock with a lid, and brought that out, too, to hold the milk. The light was failing when the man nodded, turned his back on Evangeline, and walked away, into the woods, taking the same route the black wolf had taken the night before.

When he’d disappeared from view, Evangeline sank to her knees in the snow, swept under by a devastating backwash of primal fear. Her skirts were soaked when she stopped shaking enough to stand up again and pick her way back to the barn.

Abigail was sitting on a box, the kitten on her lap, waiting. Her eyes were wide; even in the dimness, Evangeline could see the alarm in her daughter’s face. God knew what the child had imagined, sitting there alone.

“You were right, sweetheart,” Evangeline said gently. “He wanted food. That was all.”

“He’s gone?”

Evangeline nodded. “Come along. It’s time we shut up the barn and went inside to have our supper.”

They made a brief stop at the privy on the way back, and inside the house, Evangeline immediately bolted the door. Before hanging up the rifle, however, she took the time to inspect the place, going so far as to look under the bed, in the pantry, and even beneath Scully’s cot in the lean-to. All was well.

She put up the gun, removed her cloak and helped Abigail with her coat, and then went about lighting the lamps. When that was done, she washed her hands in warm water ladled from the reservoir on one side of the stove, and began preparing supper.