The train arrived in Red Hollow just before sunset, dragging a long trail of black smoke across a copper-coloured sky. The smoke thinned as it rose, and for a moment it looked less like smoke than like a dark ribbon someone had pulled slowly across the light, fraying at the edges until the evening took it apart. Caleb Morgan watched it from beside the station platform, one hand resting on the saddle of his bay horse, and tried not to count the minutes again. He had already counted them. He had been waiting for twenty minutes, and every one of those minutes had given him time to reconsider what he was doing here.
He had decided, during those twenty minutes, that this was a terrible idea.
That was not a new decision. It was the same decision he had made the day the letter had come, and again on the morning he had saddled his horse and ridden the twelve miles into town. He was still here, though. His horse stood patient beneath his hand, shifting its weight now and then, ears turning toward the train and then away again.
Caleb was thirty-two years old, and he had never been particularly good at following advice. He was worse at accepting help. That was not pride spoken aloud, the way some men spoke it, as if it were a virtue they had polished for display. It was simply a habit, formed early and hardened by years of working alone. When a fence went down, he mended it. When a calf sickened, he sat with it through the night. When the roof leaked, he climbed up with a hammer and fixed what he could reach.
Six months earlier, after that winter had nearly destroyed his ranch, he had agreed to something his mother had suggested before she died. He would marry.
He could still hear the way she had said it over the kitchen table in the last spring she had lived to see, not as an order and not as a plea, but as a plain statement. She had called it building a family. Caleb had called it practical. He had said the word as if it settled the matter. His mother had smiled at him in the way mothers do when they see through a son entirely and love him anyway, and she had not argued. She had simply let the words sit between them, and in time they had become a plan.
He had not married because he was lonely. At least, that was what he told himself, and he told it to himself often enough that it had acquired the smooth shape of a truth he could carry. He needed someone to help manage the house. Someone who understood the hardships of ranch life. Someone who would not complain when the wind tore shingles from the roof or when a winter storm trapped everyone indoors for three days. Someone who could keep accounts without flinching at a column of figures, mend a seam without being asked twice, and look at a hard season without turning away from it. That was what he had told his mother, and that was what he had told himself in the months since her death, when the house had grown quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the absence of noise.
The truth, if he had been willing to name it, was more tangled. The winter had taken cattle and it had taken fences, and it had taken, in a slower and quieter way, something of his certainty that a man could hold a ranch together by will alone. He had come through it with the ranch still standing, but with the knowledge that standing was not the same as thriving, and that a house with only one pair of hands in it was a house waiting for the next hard season to find its weakness. His mother had seen that before he had. She had seen it in the way she had always seen things: early, clearly, and without making a speech about it.
The woman he was expecting had been described to him by letter. Her name was Clara Whitmore. She was twenty-seven. Educated. Quiet. Respectable. From a family that had fallen upon difficult times. Those were the words the letter had used, and Caleb had read them so many times that he could recite them without looking at the paper, though he no longer kept the letter where he could see it. He had never seen her. He had never heard her voice except in his own imagination, where it had arrived, unbidden, as a soft and agreeable sound that asked for very little. Their marriage had been arranged through a distant acquaintance, and the agreement was simple. She would come west. He would provide a home. They would learn to live together. Caleb had convinced himself that such arrangements were common, that men and women had been making them since the first wagons had crossed the plains, and that commonness was a kind of safety. If other people had done it and endured, then he could do it and endure. That was the logic he had ridden into town with, and it had held for most of the twelve miles.
Still, as the train slowed, his stomach tightened.