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That night, Louisa did not sleep at once. She lay in the room that had been theirs and was now hers, and she thought about Joseph, and about the school he had drawn in secret, and about the way a man could love a woman and still keep a secret from her, not out of unkindness, but out of hope: he had wanted to give her something, when the time was right, that would make the ranch mean more than the two of them. And she thought about the bench above the creek, and about children she did not yet know, and about a bell that could be heard from the creek, and she fell asleep at last with the plan on the kitchen table and the lamp burning low, and the house around her holding its breath, the way a house does when it is waiting for the morning.
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In the morning, Ansel was still there, because he had nowhere else to be, and Louisa made breakfast for two, which was a strange thing after three years of breakfast for one, and they talked about the foundation, and about the timber, and about the valley, and about who might help and who might doubt. And as they talked, a sound came from the road โ not a carriage, this time, but a wagon, moving slowly, with a woman driving and two small figures beside her โ and Louisa went to the door, and saw the wagon stop at the gate, and saw the woman climb down, and saw the two children, thin and tired and dusty from the road, and heard the woman say, "Mrs. Bennett? I am from the rail camp, up the line. These two lost their parents to the fever last week. I was told you might โ I was told this house might have room."
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Louisa looked at the children, and the children looked at her, and the morning light stood still on the yard, and she said, without thinking, and without hesitation, the way a person says the truest thing they know, "Bring them in. Bring them in out of the cold."
The woman from the rail camp was named Mrs. Alden, and she had the tired, competent air of a woman who had buried more people than she could count and had stopped counting. She drank the coffee Louisa gave her standing up, because she would not sit, because sitting would have meant staying, and she had a wagon to drive back before dark. She told the story plainly, the way people tell hard stories when they have told them too many times: the fever at the rail camp, up the line, where the men laid track and their families lived in tents and shanties through the autumn; the children's father, a track layer, dead on a Tuesday; their mother, dead on the Friday after, of the same fever; the camp with no one to take two children, because everyone there was either sick or leaving or already gone; and a name, passed from mouth to mouth, of a woman on a ranch at Elk Creek who had room, or might have room, or had once been known to have a kind heart.
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"I do not know if it is true," Mrs. Alden said, looking at Louisa over the rim of her cup. "I only know I had to try somewhere, and your name was the one they gave me."
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Louisa looked at the children, who stood by the kitchen door with their hands clasped in front of them, the way children stand when they have learned not to take up too much room. The boy was twelve, tall for his age and thin, with dark hair that needed cutting and eyes that watched everything and gave nothing away. The girl was eight, small and fair, with a dress that had been mended so many times the mends had mends, and a thumb that crept toward her mouth and then stopped, as if she had been told not to, and was trying to obey even now.
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"What are your names?" Louisa asked, and she knelt down so that she was not looking down at them, because she remembered, suddenly and sharply, what it was to be small and looked down upon.
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"Ben," the boy said, and his voice was steady, though his hands were not. "And this is Tess. Our mother called her Tess, and our father called her Tessie, but she likes Tess."