“It was no different for us,” Scully said, taking the Confederate side, as he might have been expected to do. “The South was brought to its knees.”

Evangeline used two empty flour sacks for pot holders, lifted one of the kettles off the stove, and lugged it to the washtub, which she’d set over near the door. It would be easier to empty it that way, when she was finished laundering the sheets and several items of clothing.

“Then you must understand the devastation we faced, especially after Gettysburg,” she said, neatly avoiding the topic of their differing political stances. It had to stop sometime, all the division and strife and bitter acrimony on both sides. “I didn’t have a great many suitors.”

Scully was silent for a while, after the mention of Gettysburg. Perhaps he’d known men who perished there, or had even been present, a witness to the unspeakable destruction. A participant.

“It isn’t easy to be a woman, is it?” he mused.

It made Evangeline smile, that question. It was just about the last thing she would have expected a hard-headed, gun-toting, wolf-shooting rancher to ask. “No, Scully,” she answered, “it isn’t.” The smile faded as she recalled the rows and rows of wounded men, after the Federal and Confederate armies had clashed in that Pennsylvania cornfield. Remembered the screaming and the blood and the terrible stenches. The missing limbs and broken minds. The dying and the flies and the merciless, unrelenting heat. Being male wasn’t exactly child’s play, either, obviously. “I think it would be more accurate to say being human isn’t easy. But it has it’s rewards.”

He inclined his head toward the door, where Abigail could be glimpsed, and certainly heard, skipping an imaginary rope and chanting sing-song verses in time. He grinned. “Like that little one of yours,” he agreed. “She’s a marvel, Eve. And you’re a fine mother to her.”

The compliment made her glow, she could feel it. Or was it the fact that, for the second time in the last few minutes, he’d called her ‘Eve’? She probably should have rebuked him, however mildly, for addressing her in so familiar a fashion, but she couldn’t make herself do it. No one had ever shortened her name before, and it made her feel cared-for, and not quite so alone in the world.

“Thank you,” she said, kneeling beside the tub and setting a washboard into place before beginning to scrub the sheets. Although there had been clouds the evening before, the sky was clear that day, and she wanted to get the laundry outside, arranged on the bushes, before the weather turned.

“Was it hard, bringing her out here? Knowing there wouldn’t be a school and the like?”

Scrubbing away, Evangeline sighed. A deliciously fresh breeze swept into the cabin, ruffling her hair, cooling her overheated face a little. She thought with yearning of spring, so far away, and at the same time hoped it would never arrive. With the change of seasons, after all, would come Big John Keating and all the expectations of a husband who was surely more—vigorous—than Charles had been.