“Twenty-two miles northwest.”
“Wages every Saturday.”
“Room and board.”
Ruth glanced toward Nell and Tom.
Jonah followed her eyes.
“For all three of you.”
The boardwalk went very still.
Vernon laughed once.
“You hiring the children too?”
“No.”
Jonah’s voice did not change.
“I’m telling their mother they are welcome.”
Ruth looked down at the quitclaim.
Then she set the pen beside the ink bottle.
“I accept the job.”
Vernon’s face changed.
The pleasant mask cracked just enough for Ruth to see what lived beneath it.
“You will regret embarrassing me.”
Ruth folded the unsigned quitclaim and held it out.
“Then we may both have something to remember.”
Jonah loaded her trunk into his wagon.
Before touching Nell’s sewing box, he asked:
“May I?”
The question struck Ruth harder than any grand gesture could have.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
The road to Rourke Ranch took almost five hours.
Red Willow disappeared behind rolling grasslands the color of old brass.
Cottonwoods marked creek beds.
Farther west, mountains stood blue beneath a sky so enormous Ruth felt the entire territory existed to remind one person how small one life could be.
Tom asked Jonah questions for the first hour.
“How many cows do you have?”
“Enough.”
“How many horses?”
“Depends which ones have broken the fence.”
“Have you ever fought a bear?”
“No.”
“Seen one?”
“Yes.”
“Was it big?”
Jonah glanced back.
“Big enough that I did not argue with it.”
Tom considered that seriously.
Then seemed satisfied.
Ruth sat beside Jonah on the wagon seat, conscious of every jolt in the road.
She had spent years learning how to make herself smaller.
Smaller in rooms.
Smaller at boardinghouse tables.
Smaller when Samuel brought businessmen home and she handled the books afterward without being introduced.
Jonah neither crowded away from her nor made exaggerated attempts to prove he was not crowded.
He simply drove.
After a long silence, Ruth said:
“I will not stay beyond roundup if I can afford rooms in town by then.”
“That is your decision.”
“I want that understood.”
“It is.”
“And my children will not interfere with ranch work.”
Jonah looked at her.
“Mrs. Alden, children interfere with everything.”
“That is how children work.”
Nell laughed behind them.
The sound changed Jonah.
Only for a second.
His hands tightened on the reins.
His eyes went somewhere far beyond the road.
Ruth noticed.
She did not ask.
They reached the ranch near sunset.
The spread was larger than she expected.
A long weathered house.
Barn.
Bunkhouse.
Corrals.
Sheds.
And grassland stretching toward low ridges.
Men moved efficiently through the yard.
But there was something strange about the main house.
No dog barked from the porch.
No curtains stirred in the windows.
No voice came through the kitchen.
The ranch lived.
The house did not.
Jonah carried Ruth’s trunk upstairs and showed her two adjoining rooms.
“Your door latches from inside.”