Chương 1
The girl put both hands on Silas Rourke’s table and said, “My mama told me never to bother a man while he’s eating, but I think she might be dying.”
Silas stopped with the spoon halfway to his mouth.
The stew had gone cool ten minutes earlier. He had kept eating because he had paid twelve cents for it and because a man who spent his life pushing cattle learned not to insult food merely because it had surrendered its heat. He lowered the spoon into the brown clay bowl and studied the child standing across from him.
She was eight, perhaps nine, though hunger made children hard to age. Dust lay in the folds of her faded green dress. Her pale hair had been cut unevenly at her shoulders, as though someone had worked at it with sewing scissors in poor light. She was not crying. That made him listen more closely.
“Where is your father?” he asked.
“Dead.”
She answered too quickly for it to be a performance.
Silas looked beyond her into the bleaching afternoon. Mercy Crossing sat beneath the sun like something abandoned by a careless hand: a blacksmith shop, a feed store, a hotel with six rooms and nine windows, the saloon, the livery, two lines of false-front buildings pretending there was more town behind them. A freight wagon creaked past in the road. Somewhere a mule objected to being alive.
No one appeared to be looking for the girl.
“Who sent you?”
“My mama.”
“You just said she might be dying.”
“She woke up a little. Then she saw you through the barn door.”
The spoon touched the side of the bowl with a small, clean sound.
“What did she say?”
The girl’s fingers tightened against the table. “She said your name.”
Silas sat very still.
He had been in Mercy Crossing less than an hour. He had spoken to the livery boy, the cook who sold him the stew, and a cattle buyer named Harlan Price who had mistaken him for another man. He had given none of them his full name.
“Maybe she said something that sounded like it.”
“She said, ‘Silas Rourke.’ Then she told me where the scar is.”
The child touched two fingers beneath her own left ear.
The scar under Silas’s neck had faded to a pale seam, usually hidden by his kerchief. He could not feel it unless rain was coming or he had slept badly. At that moment it burned.
He pushed the bowl away.
A smaller boy stood several paces behind the girl, half concealed by the corner post of the eating shed. He wore a shirt too large for him and held one suspender together with his fist. His hair was the same color as the girl’s. When Silas looked at him, the boy looked at the ground.
“What’s your name?” Silas asked the girl.
“Mae.”
“And him?”
“Jonah.”
“Your family name?”
She hesitated. “Kincaid.”
The name brought him no relief.
Silas stood. His knees objected after three weeks in the saddle. He reached for the canvas sack he had left beneath the bench, slung it over his shoulder, and dropped two coins beside the bowl.
The cook leaned through the serving window. “You ain’t finished.”
“I noticed.”
“You paid for bread, too.”
“Give it to the children.”
Mae had already turned away. She crossed the yard quickly, checking once to make sure Silas followed. Jonah waited until Silas came near, then hurried after his sister while keeping her between himself and the stranger.
The barn stood behind the hotel, though it belonged to the livery. Its double doors were open to the sun, but the rear remained dark. Dust floated through the shafts of light. Horses shifted behind stall boards. The smell of old hay, leather, and urine pressed close around them.
Mae led him past a broken wagon tongue and three stacks of baled grass.
A woman lay in the narrow space between the hay and the barn wall.
She rested on her side beneath a gray wool blanket. One hand was tucked under her cheek. The other lay open on the straw as though she had dropped something. Her hair, once the color of corn silk, had darkened with sweat at her temples. Her face was thinner than the face Silas carried in memory, and there were small lines at the corners of her mouth that had not been there nine years before.
But it was Nora.
His wife.
The word rose in him before reason could stop it.
He dropped the sack.
A tin cup rolled from the mouth of it and circled twice in the straw.
Mae flinched at the noise. Jonah pressed his face against her shoulder.
Silas took one step forward and stopped. The last time he had seen Nora Bell, she had stood outside a whitewashed church in Abilene wearing a blue dress and no hat. Her brother had been bleeding in the road. Silas had held a train ticket in one hand and the certainty that everyone he loved would be safer once he was gone.
Nora had called his name.
He had climbed aboard anyway.
Now her lips parted on a shallow breath.
He crouched beside her and touched the side of her neck. The pulse came fast and faint beneath his fingers. Heat rose from her skin.
“She’s alive,” he said.
Mae released a breath that seemed to have been trapped in her for days.
“Can you wake her?”
“I need a doctor.”
“We asked.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Pike at the livery. He said the doctor won’t come unless we have money.”
Silas stood so quickly the blood rushed from his head.
“Stay here.”
Mae caught his sleeve. “Don’t leave.”
“I’m bringing help.”
“People say that.”
He looked down at her hand. She loosened her grip but did not withdraw it.
“I am coming back,” he said.
May you like
Her eyes searched his face for the place where adults hid lies.
Silas opened the canvas sack and took out a loaf wrapped in cloth, a slab of salt pork, two shirts, a coil of rawhide, and the leather purse containing nearly everything he had earned driving cattle north from Texas. He put the bread in Mae’s hands.
