He slid it over Eleanor’s fourth finger. It fit smoothly, resting against her skin like sunlight.
"With this ring I thee wed," Nathan whispered, his voice for her ears alone now, "and with my body I thee honor, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."
Reverend Hale laid his right hand over theirs.
"Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. Forasmuch as Nathan and Eleanor have consented together in holy wedlock, and have witnessed the same before God and this company, I pronounce that they are husband and wife."
The preacher smiled, stepped back, and nodded. "Nathan, you may kiss your wife."
Nathan lifted his hands to the hem of the tulle veil. Slowly, with infinite care, as if he were handling the most fragile petal of a prairie rose, he turned the sheer fabric back over her hair.
For three seconds, he looked down into her face. He saw the soft curve of her lips, the high warmth in her cheeks, and the fierce, steady light in her gray eyes that had first stopped him in his tracks on a snowy porch at five in the morning.
He leaned down and kissed her.
It was not a hurried, bashful peck of a frontiersman before an audience. It was a long, tender, and deeply passionate claim—a kiss that held the memory of the cold, the relief of the thaw, and the promise of a lifetime of shelter.
From the rear pews, a sudden, thunderous shout went up.
Pete Jenkins threw his hat clean into the ceiling timbers, and thirty cowhands erupted into a roar of whistling, foot-stamping, and wild cheering that rattled the glass in the sanctuary windows. Even old Caleb Finch was on his feet, laughing and slapping Walter Higgins on the shoulder until the blacksmith’s collar finally popped loose from its brass stud.
The celebration that followed at the Crowley Ranch was remembered across the Wyoming Territory for forty years.
By two o'clock in the afternoon, the broad limestone bench resembled a harvest festival of old. The great ranch yard had been swept clean of every winter twig. Between the main house and the long barn, three immense trestle tables of split pine had been erected, draped in white linen tablecloths that fluttered merrily in the warm mountain breeze.
At the edge of the coulee, two deep roasting pits had been burning since noon the previous day.
Zebediah Vance, armed with a long iron fork and wearing an apron made of clean canvas, presided over the meat with the solemn intensity of an ancient priest. Three whole yearlings, butchered from the prime fat stock of the lower meadows, turned slowly over hickory and chokecherry coals, dripping fragrant fat that hissed into the embers and sent an aroma of roasting beef drifting across the valley that could have drawn wolves from sixty miles out.
Beside the pits sat iron cauldrons of brown beans stewed with molasses and cured pork, tubs of butter-churned sweet corn, heaps of sourdough biscuits baked golden in Dutch ovens, and ten wooden crates of dried-apple and wild-plum pies that Martha and the women from the town had spent three days rolling out.
On the veranda of the ranch house, two fiddlers from the Sweetwater and Walter Higgins with his button accordion had taken up their posts on three-legged stools.
The music was fast, stomping, and relentless: The Irish Washerwoman, Soldier’s Joy, and The Girl I Left Behind Me. Men who had spent four months confined to small cabins danced with women whose faces were flushed with laughter, their heavy boots making the cedar planks of the veranda hum like a drumhead.
In the open corrals, Henry and Samuel were the undisputed kings of the day.
A crowd of children from the town and the outlying homesteads had gathered around the round-pen, where Nathan had turned out the little roan filly. Samuel stood upon the second rail of the fence, holding his pine horse aloft for all to see, explaining with grand, five-year-old authority that the horse in his hand was the mother of every mare in the territory.
"She doesn't eat grass, neither!" Samuel proclaimed to the blacksmith’s younger son, who listened with open-mouthed reverence. "She eats magic and salt, and she knows how to run faster than a steam train!"
Henry, leaning against the post with his thumbs hooked in his new belt, watched his brother with an older boy's benevolent amusement.
Nathan walked across the yard, carrying a tin cup of cold well water. He stopped by the corral rail, rested his boot on the lower bar, and ruffled Henry’s hair.
"You keeping an eye on the herd, son?" Nathan asked.
Henry looked up, his face breaking into a wide, honest grin that lit up his eyes. "Samuel’s telling lies about the filly again, Nathan."
Nathan took a slow sip from the cup, his gray eyes glinting. "Well, out here, a man’s entitled to stretch the truth a little bit about his horse. Just so long as he tells the dead-level truth about his cattle and his accounts."