“He was harmless,” Evangeline said, pointedly removing the fish and putting them in a basin in the kitchen. “He wanted food, that’s all.”

“Mama was real brave. She told me and Hortense to stay in the barn and we did. She had your rifle, and she made the Indian walk in front of her, all the way to the house.”

“You let him in the house?” Scully rasped. He didn’t sound angry, so much as shocked. Maybe even horrified.

“Of course not,” Evangeline said. Her temper was beginning to rise; she knew all too well that it was the fact of Scully, and the effect he had upon her, not the words he’d spoken, that irritated her. It wasn’t right or proper for her to be so glad to see him, but she was. God help her, she was, even if it did appear that he was going to be difficult about the Indian. “I had him wait in the dooryard while I came in to get a blanket and an old jug to hold the milk. I couldn’t just let him walk away with a perfectly good bucket, could I?”

He looked down at Abigail with a baffled expression. “Who in the devil is Hortense?”

Abigail beamed. “That’s my kitten. Mama said she’s a girl, so I named her Hortense. She was born in the barn.”

Scully closed his eyes for a moment. “I see,” he said. Evangeline didn’t believe that he did. He set Abigail down, then removed and hung up his coat. Hortense came out from under the bed, mewing, and approached, sniffing at his boots. He looked absolutely miserable, as if he’d like to bolt, and go back to sleeping in the barn, where he would not be surrounded by troublesome females.

In silence, he collected the basin from the wash-stand, carried it to the stove, and filled it with hot water out of the reservoir. Then he went back to the little table and splashed his face and hands clean. Both Abigail and Evangeline watched him, Abigail openly, Evangeline surreptitiously, while she spooned beans into metal bowls and put them on the table.

Neither Scully nor Evangeline said much during the meal—the room seemed to Evangeline to be crackling with some unseen energy, like the inside of a thundercloud—but Abigail chattered from the “amen” at the end of the prayer to her mother’s announcement that she could be excused.

Soon, sitting on the rug, which Evangeline had moved from the foot of the bed to the area in front of the hearth, Abigail was engaged in making her fingers run across the floor, so that Hortense would give chase.

“Miss June-bug sent you back a letter,” Scully said, after a long time. He was looking toward the fire and the little girl and the kitten as he spoke. “She said to bring you over to Springwater to visit first chance I get. I reckon that will be about the time Big John comes home with the cattle.” At this, he turned to meet her eyes. “I don’t look for the weather to get anything but worse before then.”