“It was mighty sweet of Evangeline to write to me,” she said, patting the pocket of her apron where she carried the envelope addressed to her and Jacob in schoolmarmish handwriting. “I ain’t had mail in years.”

Jacob didn’t look up from his grievous position on the checkers board. “You had that flier from them mail order people back in Chicago,” he said.

June-bug waved a hand in dismissal, but her smile never faltered. “That don’t count for nothin’. They just wanted to sell us one of them sent-for houses.” A dreamy expression crossed her ageless face. “It had a bathtub and everything, that house.”

“They come in pieces,” Jacob remarked, for the benefit of anybody who might cherish an interest. “The houses, I mean.”

June-bug went back to the stove, where she was baking something savory-smelling to put by for tomorrow’s breakfast. There was always a chance the next stage might make it through, and the passengers were bound to be hungry.

“That would take some big-ass freight wagons,” Trey observed, referring to the mail order homestead, Scully presumed. He kept thinking about Evangeline and Abigail, wondering if they were all right, if they were scared. He’d wanted to turn right around and head back, but June-bug had talked him out of it, saying he’d do no service to anyone by getting lost in the dark and ending up “froze to death” out there on the trail someplace.

Jacob laughed at Trey’s comment about the freight wagons, his voice low and deep, but his expression was somber when he caught Scully’s eye. He didn’t miss a hell of a lot, old Jacob.

“I figure Big John will be back as soon as the snow’s melted off and the mud dries up a little. Ain’t that so, Scully?” It was a subtle reminder that Evangeline belonged to somebody else, and he’d best not get to missing her too much. Jacob was real good at conveying messages like that, and his moral authority couldn’t be questioned, since he was something of a preacher.

Scully nodded miserably. “I don’t reckon a little mud’ll hold him back,” he said.

CHAPTER

5

JUNE-BUG PRESSED several sheets of folded paper into Scully’s hand the next morning, after breakfast, when he was ready to head for home, along with a tin of her special fudge candy. She’d dipped into precious stores of sugar and ground cocoa beans to make the confection, and it was a sure sign of her esteem.

“You bring Evangeline and that lovely child of hers to see us, when the weather gets better. I don’t imagine that will happen before Christmas, let alone after, but we’d sure like to have a visit.”

Scully leaned down to kiss June-bug’s forehead. He’d already exchanged taciturn good-byes with Jacob, and Hargreaves had ridden out before the sun was up, bent on some business of his own. “You’d better get back inside the station before you catch cold,” he said. Then he tucked the letter into his pocket and the tin of fudge into one of his saddlebags. It was good to have the nameless horse back—he simply referred to it as “the Appaloosa”—and he patted the animal’s long neck before mounting.