"You told me you didn't whittle," she said, her voice dropping into a breathless whisper.
Nathan rubbed the back of his neck, a faint, endearing flush creeping up past his collar. "I didn't use to have anything worth carving for," he admitted quietly. "Took me three weeks to get the wings right. Broke two blades on the cedar knots."
Eleanor turned the little bird over in her palm.
On the underside, carved into the clean wood with delicate, microscopic strokes, were two letters:
E. P.
"Nathan," she breathed, looking up into his eyes.
Nathan did not drop to his knees; he was a man of the Wyoming mountains, built for standing firm against the wind. But he took her free hand in both of his own, his skin warm, rough, and protective.
"I've spent thirty years on this range, Eleanor," Nathan said, his voice deep and steady, yet carrying an undercurrent of emotion that made her heart sing. "I thought this ranch was just grass, cattle, and a fence to keep the world out. I thought surviving was enough. But these past months... watching you fight for your boys, watching you stand up to Silas, watching you bring life and light into this cold, empty house... I realized I was just an empty man living in a big fortress."
He paused, his gray eyes searching hers with complete, vulnerable honesty.
"The town has a teacher now," he continued softly. "Your eighty acres are clear and deeded to your name. You can take your boys and live in peace on the flat, and there isn't a man in this territory who wouldn't take his hat off when you pass."
"Are you asking me to leave, Nathan?" she asked, a gentle, teasing smile trembling on her lips.
"I'm asking you to stay," he said instantly, his grip on her hand tightening. "Not as my clerk. Not as my accountant. I'm asking you to be my wife, Eleanor. I want to build a life with you. I want to be a father to Henry and Samuel, if they'll have me. And I want you to sit by this hearth every night for the rest of my days, so I never have to look out through that window at a cold, empty sky again."
Eleanor rose from the chair.
She did not look at the fine house, the great timber roofs, or the thousands of acres stretching out beneath the stars. She looked only at the man standing before her—the man who had ridden through a deadly blizzard to leave bread for starving children, the man who had faced down an empire of greed with an iron will, and who now stood before her with his heart laid bare in his rough, calloused hands.
She stepped forward, closing the small space between them, and rested her palms against his chest, right over the steady, powerful beating of his heart.
"I stopped being afraid of the winter the morning you took off your hat in the snow, Nathan," she whispered, her eyes shining with tears of pure, unalloyed joy. "Yes. I will stay. I will stay with you forever."
Nathan drew her into his arms, wrapping his heavy sheepskin coat around her, pulling her close against his chest. As his mouth found hers, warm and tender in the amber light of the dying hearth, Eleanor knew that the long, cruel winter of 1886 was finally over, washed away by a love as enduring as the limestone hills.
The bells of the Wind River Methodist Church began to ring at half-past nine on the first Sunday of June.
It was the very same bronze bell that had hung in the dark belfry through the bitterest months of the Great Die-Up, the bell whose iron throat had kept silent vigil over Thomas Crowley’s federal claim certificate while the winter tore the flesh from the plains. But today, the bell was no longer a vault for secrets or an emblem of a frozen siege. The iron tongue swung wide, its deep, resonant voice rolling down the coulee, tumbling through the wild plum thickets in the bottoms, and carrying on the clean morning air all the way to the rimrock benches where the sheep grazed in blue-green bunchgrass.
The sky above the territory was an immense, unbroken vault of larkspur blue. The cruel iron cast that had pressed down upon the earth since November had vanished, dissolved into weeks of sunlight so bright it turned the cottonwood leaves to fluttering silver coins. Everywhere the prairie was green—not the delicate, fragile green of an eastern meadow, but the fierce, triumphant green of northern turf that had fought its way up through four feet of drift and iron-hard permafrost.
Along the river road, the dust rose in soft, amber plumes behind an endless procession of wheels and hooves.