Part 1
The wind in this part of Wyoming Territory did not simply blow. It scoured. It came down from the peaks of the Big Horns carrying the memory of ice, slicing across the plains and finding every crack in Eli Morgan’s small, sturdy cabin. It was a frostbitten spring, the kind that promised green and delivered only frozen mud.
Eli was riding the boundary of his land, checking the wire he had strung the previous fall. It was thankless work, but it was his. The land was all he had: a wide, empty bowl of grassland and sagebrush bordered by craggy hills that turned purple at dusk. He had no neighbors for miles in any direction. He preferred it that way.
The silence suited him, suited the man he had become after the war and after the fever had taken Mary and the boy.
He saw the shape near the creek bed as the light began to fail. At first he thought it was a sick calf strayed from his meager herd. He nudged his buckskin closer. It was not a calf.
It was a person standing unsteadily by the half-frozen water, swaying like a willow branch.
He stopped the horse. The figure was small, a woman. She was wearing only a thin shift, the kind worn beneath a proper dress or for sleeping. It was torn at the shoulder and smeared with dirt. She was barefoot.
Eli swung down from the saddle, his movements stiff from the cold. The ground was hard, littered with sharp stones and patches of old snow. To be barefoot out here was madness. It was a death sentence.
“Ma’am.” His voice was rough, rusted from disuse.
The woman’s head snapped toward him. Her eyes were wide, white showing all around, a terror so profound it struck him silent for a moment. She looked like a trapped animal, one that would chew its own leg off to get free. She was limping, favoring her left side. When she tried to back away, she stumbled and fell to one knee. He saw blood on her feet, cracked and dark.
“I ain’t here to hurt you,” Eli said, keeping his voice low. He held his hands away from the pistol on his hip. “You’re freezing. You’ll die out here.”
She stared at him, chest heaving. She was young, maybe 20, maybe less. Her hair was matted with burrs and mud. She made no sound, just watched him, ready to bolt.
“My cabin’s just over that rise,” he said, pointing. “There’s a fire. Food. You can’t stay here.”
The wind whipped her shift against her legs, outlining bone. He saw her shiver, a violent, rattling tremor that seemed to shake her very soul. He took a slow step. She flinched, scrambling backward on her hands and one knee, dragging her injured foot.
“Stop,” he said, firm but not unkind. “I’m not chasing you. But the sun’s down. Wolves will be out. You come with me or you don’t see morning. It’s your choice.”
He waited a full minute. The only sound was the howling wind and the sharp stamp of his horse’s hoof.
Finally she stopped trying to move away. She did not rise. She remained huddled on the frozen ground, defeated.
Eli walked to her slowly. He shrugged off his heavy wool coat, the sheepskin lining worn but warm. He held it out. She stared at the coat, not his face. He draped it over her shoulders. She collapsed into the warmth, burying her face in the collar.
“Can you walk?”
She tried to push herself up using one arm. She grimaced, a sharp intake of breath, and fell back.
Eli sighed. He hated complications, and this woman was the largest complication ever to step onto his land. He bent down, sliding one arm under her knees and the other behind her back. She weighed almost nothing.
She went rigid in his arms but was too weak to fight. He carried her to the horse, lifted her onto the saddle, then mounted behind her, holding her steady against his chest. She trembled so violently he could feel it through his shirt. He turned the buckskin toward home.
The cabin was one room, clean but spare: a bed in one corner, a stone hearth with a crackling fire, a dry sink, a rough-hewn table, and two chairs. He sat her in one of the chairs near the hearth. She immediately curled inward, pulling his coat tighter, her eyes tracking every corner of the room.
He ladled what was left of a thin beef stew into a bowl and set it on the table with a piece of hard bread.
“Eat.”
She stared at it as if it might be poison. The smell of hot broth reached her and her body betrayed her fear. Her hands shook as she lifted the spoon. She ate fast, desperately, spilling broth down her chin.
Eli turned his back, pretending to busy himself at the stove, giving her the dignity of not being watched.
When the bowl was empty, she set the spoon down. The sound was loud in the silence. He refilled it. She ate the second serving slower.
He sat across from her and rolled a cigarette but did not light it. He just worked the tobacco between his fingers.
“My name’s Eli Morgan,” he said to the floor.
He waited. The fire popped. The wind moaned around the eaves.
“Clara,” she whispered. Her voice was a dry scratch.
He nodded. “Clara.”
He did not ask what had happened or where she had come from. In this territory most people were running from something. Questions invited trouble.
He motioned toward the bed. “You take that. I’ll sleep by the fire.”
She looked from the bed to him, suspicion warring with exhaustion so deep it looked like death.
“I ain’t going to touch you,” he said flatly. “Just want to get through the night. Go on.”
She moved to the bed, sliding beneath the heavy quilts, still wearing his coat. She lay on her side facing the wall, her body drawn tight into a knot.
Eli laid his bedroll near the hearth, close enough for warmth but far enough to give her space. He removed his boots and gun belt, laying the pistol near his hand out of habit. He banked the fire, turned down the kerosene lamp, and lay down.
The cabin fell into a heavy quiet.
He listened to her breathing. It was shallow and quick. She was not sleeping.
He stared into the dying coals, his mind restless. The instincts that had kept him alive in war were screaming. This woman was not just lost. She was hunted.
He must have dozed because the first scream tore him from sleep.
He was on his feet before his eyes opened, pistol in hand, scanning the darkness.
“No, get off. Don’t.”
It was Clara.
She sat bolt upright in the bed, eyes open but unseeing. She clawed at the log wall, fingers digging into wood.
“Clara,” he said sharply.
She did not hear him. She screamed again, a raw, throat-tearing sound. She thrashed, kicking the quilts away, fighting something invisible.
He moved closer but kept his distance. “Clara, wake up. You’re dreaming.”
She went suddenly silent. Her body seized, then she fell back onto the pillow, sobbing dry, hitched sobs.
Eli stood barefoot on the cold floor, pistol heavy in his hand. He set it down and added a log to the fire. The new flames cast wild shadows.
He sat on his bedroll, back against the hearth. He would not sleep again.
An hour passed. Her breathing evened out, but it was not the breathing of sleep. It was the breathing of someone holding perfectly still, listening.
The second time began with a whimper.
“Please. I can’t. I can’t.”
He was already watching her.
The scream came just as loud as the first. She threw herself sideways, tangling in the quilts and falling to the floor.
He moved to her and grabbed her shoulders. Her eyes snapped open. She saw him but did not recognize him. She shrieked and slammed the heel of her hand into his nose.
Pain exploded. He fell back, blood gushing hot over his mouth.
“Damn it,” he hissed, pinching the bridge of his nose.
The shock of striking him seemed to wake her. She scrambled backward until she hit the wall and huddled there, panting. She saw the blood and her face crumpled.
“Go to sleep,” he said thickly through blood. He grabbed a rag and held it to his face. “It’s just a dream.”
He returned to his spot by the fire and sat upright, watching her. Eventually she climbed back into the bed but did not lie down. She sat with her back to the wall, knees drawn up, watching him.
The third time she did not scream. She just cried, a deep hopeless sound worse than the screaming.
The fourth time she clawed at her own throat as if trying to tear something away.
By the fifth time the sky outside was turning pale gray. She jolted awake with a small cry and then lay rigid, staring at the ceiling.
Five times in one night.
Eli rose as the sun crested the horizon. His nose throbbed. Exhaustion settled deep in his bones. He rebuilt the fire and set the coffee pot on.
He did not look at her. He moved about the cabin, pulling on his boots, checking his pistol. He poured two cups of black coffee and set one on the table near her.
“I got chores,” he said, and left.
He worked all morning with sharp, angry movements. He chopped wood, splitting frozen pine with vicious cracks. He fed the cattle, shoulders hunched against the wind. Every gust that struck the cabin sounded like a rattling door, like a shout.
When he returned, she was dressed. He had left a pair of his old wool trousers and a spare flannel shirt on a chair. They hung absurdly large on her frame, cinched at the waist with rope. She had washed her face. Beneath the grime her skin was pale, bruised under the eyes.
She stood by the door, staring at the latch.
“There’s bread and salt pork if you’re hungry,” he said.
“I need to leave.”
“You won’t last a day. You saw the land. There’s nothing for 50 miles. And you’ve got no boots.”
“I can’t stay.”
“You ain’t in no condition to go.”
She was a coiled spring. Every sound made her jump. Her eyes darted from door to window and back again. She never relaxed. Not for a second.
Days passed.
The routine settled into something brutal. He worked the ranch all day. At night he sat by the fire and waited. The screaming never stopped. Five times, sometimes six, he would wake before she did, hearing the change in her breathing.
He tried sleeping in the barn to give her the cabin, but he could not. He found himself at the barn door listening toward the house, instincts demanding he be closer. So he remained by the hearth.
One morning he woke to find her gone.
His heart seized. He grabbed his coat and ran outside. The air cut his lungs. He saw her at the far fence line, clinging to a post at the edge of his property, staring at the empty plains.
She heard him approach but did not run.
She was shaking, barely able to stand. She had made it 200 yards. That was all she had.
She pushed off the post, took one step, and her legs buckled. She collapsed onto the hard dirt.
Eli reached her without a word. He bent, scooped her up, and carried her back to the cabin.
As he set her down, the collar of the oversized shirt slipped open. He saw it.
Below her collarbone was a jagged wound, red and puckered, healing poorly, edged with infection. It was not a cut. It looked like a brand or deliberate burn.
He looked at her arms where the sleeves were rolled. Thin white scars clustered around her wrists. Rope or chains.
A cold stillness settled over him, colder than the wind. He had seen what men did in war. He had not expected to find it here.
He fetched a tin of carbolic salve and a clean rag. He knelt in front of her.
“It’s festering,” he said quietly. “Needs cleaning.”
“Don’t,” she whispered.
“I’m not asking.”
He pushed the shirt aside gently. She squeezed her eyes shut, bracing. His hands, rough from wire and wood, were careful. He cleaned the wound. She hissed but did not pull away. He spread the salve over the raw flesh, feeling the heat of infection.
He finished and pulled the shirt closed.
“Is someone after you, Clara?”
She bowed her head. That was answer enough.
He stood. “Stay put. Don’t try to run again. You’re wasting energy.”
After that she began to help.
One morning he returned from the barn to find her sweeping. The next day she gathered eggs, movements quick and wary as if the chickens might attack. She hauled wood, stacking it by the door until she swayed on her feet.
The fear never left her face. She would stop mid-task and stare at the horizon, listening. But the work seemed to ground her.
They existed in silence. Silent chores. Silent meals of coffee and bread. At night the screaming.
One evening as he banked the fire she spoke from the bed.
“Don’t lock the door.”
He paused, shovel in hand. He always locked the door. It was the first thing he did at sundown.
“Why?”
“Please. I can’t be locked in.”
He thought of the scars on her wrists. He set the heavy bar beside the door but did not slide it into place.
“It ain’t locked,” he said.
A week later she spoke again in the dark.
“Don’t let them find me.”
It was not a request. It was a plea.
Something shifted in his chest. He was no longer just a man offering shelter. He had been asked for protection.
He began to sleep lighter. He learned the moment before the terror took her, the hitch in her breath, the low moan.
When it came he crossed the floor before the scream. He placed his hands firmly on her shoulders, anchoring her.
“Clara,” he said steadily. “You’re safe.”
She fought him at first, not hearing.
“You’re safe. Ain’t nobody here. It’s just me. Eli. You’re in my cabin. You’re safe.”
She stopped fighting. The scream died in her throat. She opened her eyes and saw him.
He held her until the trembling eased, then stepped back.
The next night he did it again.
They barely spoke during the day, but the nights changed. He was the man who kept the fire lit. He was the thing that stood between her and the ghosts.
The frost broke. The land softened. The creek roared brown and swollen.
He gave her a spade and a sack of seed potatoes and took her to the small patch behind the cabin sheltered by juniper.
“We plant these or we don’t eat this winter.”
She watched and copied his movements. The mud sucked at the boots he had given her, Mary’s old pair stuffed with rags to fit. Within an hour her hands were blistered. She kept working.
That evening, boots steaming by the hearth, she spoke to the flames.
“It was a cellar,” she said quietly.
He did not look up from the bridle he was mending. He just listened.
“Always dark. Smelled of damp stone and peppermint. His breath. He chewed peppermint root.”
His fingers tightened on the leather.
“The chains were cold in the morning.”
She stopped, hands gone still, back in the dark. He resumed his steady stitching and did not press her further.
The nights remained a battleground, but the ritual held. He would wake, go to her, and she would grasp his forearms, using him as an anchor.
One night the shaking did not stop. She collapsed against him and for the first time wept openly, not dry sobs but a storm of grief that shook her entire body.
He held her. He held her as she cried for the cellar, for the chains, for the peppermint breath.
He was exhausted from broken sleep, but he was tethered to her now.
He began to notice her during the day. The reddish glint in her brown hair in weak sunlight. The set of her jaw as she gripped the axe handle. The fight in her.
He realized with a jolt that he was beginning to fall for her.
It was not soft. It was forged in darkness.
The change came in her too.
They were mending fence on the north pasture when she nodded at the puckered scar on his palm.
“Your hand.”
“Shrapnel,” he said. “Gettysburg.”
“You were a soldier.”
“I was.”
“Is that why you live here? So alone?”
He stopped twisting wire and looked at the plains.
“My wife, Mary, and my son, Thomas. Fever outbreak 6 years ago. They didn’t last the winter. I buried them on that hill.”
He pointed to a rise marked by two nearly invisible wooden crosses.
“I built this place for them. After they were gone, I just stayed. The quiet suited me.”
That night the cabin felt different.
Near midnight he woke to the sound of the door opening.
He was on his feet instantly. The bed was empty.
He grabbed his rifle and burst outside.
He found her in the barn, burrowing into a pile of hay with a horse blanket.
“What are you doing?”
“I can’t stay in there,” she whispered. “It’s her bed. Her grave. I’m soiled, Eli. I’m bringing my dirt into her.”
A cold fury filled him, not directed at her.
“Mary is gone,” he said hard. “The bed is just a bed. And you ain’t sleeping with the animals. Not while I’m breathing.”
He pulled her to her feet and marched her back inside, barring the door.
“You stay in that bed. It’s warm. That’s all that matters.”
The next morning she handed him coffee. Their fingers brushed and she did not pull away.
She raised her hand and laid her palm against his cheek.
“You’re the only man,” she whispered, “who never touched me when I was too weak to say no.”
He closed his eyes.
The wall between them began to dissolve.
Days later in the barn during a storm, lightning flashing through cracks in the boards, rain hammering the roof, they found themselves standing close. His hand rose to her jaw. She leaned into him.
The kiss was hesitant, clumsy, tasting of rain and salt. A question.
She answered.
Thunder crashed and they broke apart, breathless.
Then Eli heard a horse in the yard.
He pushed her toward the loft. “Hide. Don’t make a sound.”
A large man in a yellow slicker rode into the yard and stopped before the cabin.
“You lost, mister?” Eli called.
“Looking for someone,” the man said. “Man at the general store said you lived out this way.”
“I live out this way to be left alone. State your business.”
“Looking for a runaway. A whore named Clara. Stabbed a preacher near Laramie and fled. You seen a woman like that? Small. Brown hair. Looks half starved.”
From the loft Clara’s hand flew to her mouth.
Eli’s face did not change. “Never heard the name. You’re on the wrong ranch.”
“There’s a reward. 50 dollars.”
“I said I don’t know her.”
He raised his pistol slightly, visible but not aimed.
The man studied him, then rode off into the rain.
When Eli returned to the barn and bolted the door, Clara descended the ladder shaking.
“Fifty dollars,” she whispered. “He’s right. That’s all I am.”
That night she did not scream. She cried silently.
Before dawn Eli woke to silence. The bed was empty. The bar on the door was gone.
She had fled.
He saddled the buckskin and rode hard into the dark mud.
He found her at the riverbank. The storm had swollen the creek into a raging torrent.
She was wading into the icy water.
“Clara!” he roared.
“Go back!” she screamed. “They’ll kill you. I’m poison. Let me go.”
She stepped deeper. The current took her.
Eli plunged into the freezing water, grabbed her shirt, and dragged her out despite her clawing and screams to let her die.
He hauled her onto the bank and threw her onto the horse, mounting behind her, wrapping his arms around her shaking body.
He kicked the cabin door open and dragged her inside, barring it.
“You should have left me,” she sobbed.
“Did you kill him?” Eli asked quietly.
“No,” she whispered. “But I should have.”
He knelt and began unbuttoning her soaked shirt. His hands shook but his movements were practical. She was freezing. He stripped off his own wet shirt as well.
They stood before the dying embers, soaked and shaking.
He cupped her face. “You’re alive, Clara.”
He kissed her.
This kiss was not hesitant. It was desperate. It was a vow.
He carried her to the bed.
It was not perfect or gentle. It was clumsy and aching and raw. It was the frantic need to feel alive, to erase the cellar and the preacher and the cold river.
In the dark cabin, wind rising again outside, they clung to each other.
Dawn came brittle and cold.
They dressed in dry clothes. The air between them had changed.
She spoke first.
“His name was Preacher Silas.”
Part 2
“His name was Preacher Silas.”
Eli stood by the hearth, coffee in hand, and turned slowly toward her. He had not asked, but after the river there was no avoiding it.
“He ran a sanctuary in Laramie,” she continued. The word sanctuary sounded wrong in her mouth. “For troubled girls. Orphans. Runaways. Girls no one would miss.”
She stared into her cup. “We weren’t troubled. We were just alone. He gave us food and a bed. Told us we owed him our souls. Said we had to be cleansed.”
“The cleansing,” she whispered. “It was him. In the cellar.”
The memory caught in her throat. She swallowed and forced the words forward.
“He said we were paying our debt to God. He quoted scripture while he…” She could not finish.
Eli did not press her.
“But that wasn’t the worst of it,” she said. “The sanctuary was a lie. It was a store. He sold us. To men from town. Men with coin and good reputations. Men who wanted silence.”
Eli’s hand tightened into a fist at his side.
“They kept us in the cellar. He told them we were sinners. That they were doing God’s work by punishing us. I was there 2 years.”
Her fingers brushed the scars at her wrists.
“I tried to leave. So many times. He was strong. The locks…” She took a breath. “One night he came to my room. He was drunk. He forgot to lock the chains. There was a fire poker in the hearth. It was glowing. He turned his back. I took it. I hit him. In the back. He fell. He screamed. And I kept hitting him. Until he stopped moving. Until the screaming stopped.”
The cabin was silent.
“I don’t know if he lived,” she whispered. “I just ran. I ran until my feet bled. I ran until you found me.”
“The men who came here,” she added, “they weren’t just bounty hunters. They were customers. They want me back for what I did. Or because they paid for me.”
She looked at him, waiting for judgment.
Eli refilled his coffee, took a slow drink, and met her eyes.
“Even if you had killed him,” he said quietly, “I’d still want you here.”
She stared at him, disbelief shifting into something fragile and new. A tear slipped down her cheek.
Spring deepened. The world outside the cabin turned green. Clara worked beside him, no longer a ghost but a presence. She mended his shirts. She cleared stones from the potato patch. She learned the rhythms of the ranch.
One afternoon she laughed.
The old billy goat, Samson, had tried to mount a placid ewe. The ewe stepped aside without looking. Samson sailed past and landed in the mud trough, sputtering indignantly.
Clara let out a short, startled bark of laughter. Then another. A real laugh, bright and unused.
Eli watched her, a small smile touching his own face. It was the first true laughter in his home since Mary and Thomas had died.
But guilt lingered in her. After moments of ease she would grow quiet again. She saw herself as ruined, as an intrusion into the life he had built for his wife and son. She began to pull away, avoiding his touch, speaking less.
Their bodies told a different story.
In the barn, in the pasture under a bruised purple sky, they found each other in moments sharp and urgent. He moved his bedroll from the hearth and into the bed. Some nights they lay side by side without touching. Other nights they turned toward each other and closed the distance.
He kissed the scar beneath her collarbone. He kissed the white lines on her wrists. With every touch he told her she was not soiled.
But the world beyond the ranch did not forget.
They rode to town for flour, salt, coffee, and ammunition. It was Clara’s first time off his land.
As they rode down the muddy street, conversations stopped. Men paused mid-whittle. Women gathered outside the general store went silent, faces hardening. Clara lowered her gaze to the horn of her saddle.
Inside Henderson’s store the warm air smelled of tobacco and pickles. Mr. Henderson’s greeting faltered when he saw Clara behind Eli.
While Henderson gathered supplies, two old men by the stove watched openly.
“You’re a good man, Eli,” Henderson muttered quietly. “You should keep better company.”
“I’ll choose my own company,” Eli replied flatly. “Just fill the order.”
The ride home was silent.
A week later Eli returned from his monthly trip to the mail drop 10 miles east with a single crumpled envelope. No return address. His name scrawled in a crude hand.
He read it inside the cabin. Clara was kneading bread.
“We know she’s there. You’ll regret it.”
He crushed the letter and threw it into the fire.
“It’s them, isn’t it?” she whispered. “They know.”
She grabbed her coat.
“I have to go. I told you I was poison. They’ll burn this place.”
He stepped between her and the door.
“You’re done running,” he said. “This is your home.”
“They’ll kill you.”
“Let them try.”
He opened the oak chest where he kept his war things and took out a small Colt cloverleaf revolver. He pressed it into her palm.
“If you’re staying, you’re learning.”
Outside he set three empty bean tins on the fence and showed her how to load and hold the gun.
Her hands shook. The first shot hit dirt 10 feet wide. She dropped the pistol.
“Pick it up,” he said calmly.
She fired again. Missed. Again. Missed.
Tears streamed down her face.
“Stop crying,” he said. “Aim.”
She wiped her eyes, inhaled, and squeezed.
The bullet struck the tin with a sharp ping. The can flew from the post.
She stared at it, chest heaving, then reloaded the revolver herself.
The nights changed.
One night when the breath hitched and he rose from bed, the scream that followed was different. It was not thin terror but rage.
“Get off me! I’ll kill you!”
She sat upright, fists swinging at air.
He grabbed her shoulders. “Clara. It’s me. You’re safe.”
Her eyes opened. Recognition dawned slowly.
She collapsed against him, shaking with adrenaline.
She was no longer only a victim. Even in sleep she was fighting.
The next morning she pulled him down into a fierce kiss.
“I want to belong to you,” she whispered. “Fully. I’m not his. I’m not theirs. I want to be yours.”
He nodded and accepted.
They waited 7 days before returning to town again.
Clara wore trousers and a jacket. The Colt rested at her waistband. They rode side by side.
When they entered town the silence was immediate and heavy.
As Clara dismounted, a man spat tobacco juice inches from her boot.
“Filthy,” he slurred.
“That’s the church whore,” another man called.
Eli stepped off the boardwalk without a word. He crossed the distance to Jed, the drunk who had spoken.
His fist moved in a short brutal arc.
Jed crumpled into the dirt unconscious.
The other men stumbled back. The street fell silent.
Eli tied his reins calmly and went inside the store.
Clara stood shaking, not with fear but with a fierce energy.
Sheriff Brody crossed the street moments later. An older man worn by years of trying to keep peace.
“A word, Eli,” he said when Eli emerged.
They spoke inside the sheriff’s office.
When Eli returned his face was harder.
“The man I hit,” he told Clara once they were home, “his cousin’s the telegraph operator. Sheriff got a wire from Laramie this morning. They know you’re here. Men are expected. Friends of Silas.”
“Customers,” she whispered.
“He told me, for the peace of the town, I should turn you in.”
She stood and took down her coat.
“I’m leaving.”
He did not block the door. He stood in the center of the room.
“You leave, they win,” he said. “You run, you’re just what they named you. They ain’t taking you.”
“I’m trying to save you.”
“I’ll protect what’s mine.”
She saw in his eyes that he meant it. That he would fight. That he would die.
Fear for him settled heavy in her chest.
She hung the coat back on the peg.
That night she moved to the far edge of the bed. When he reached for her, she flinched.
For 3 days she kept distance. She spoke in clipped sentences. She scrubbed floors until her knuckles bled. She told him he would die for a damaged woman not worth his life.
On the third night he rose and ordered her to light the lamp.
He stood in the center of the room and removed his shirt.
His back was a map of violence: a round cattle brand on his shoulder, lash marks crossing his skin, a shrapnel scar at his side, a knife wound over his ribs, a burn that left waxy skin on his arm.
“You think you’re the only one?” he asked.
He told her about the brand at 12 years old for letting a calf stray. About lashings on a cattle drive. About a knife fight at 17.
“You think broken means unlovable?”
She slid from the bed and touched the brand, the lash marks, the scars.
“We all got scars,” he said softly. “Some on the inside, some on the out. They just mean we lived.”
He kissed her slowly. Tenderly.
The wall she had built collapsed.
Two days later the riders came.
Five men on the ridge, riding hard for the cabin.
“Eli!” she screamed.
He ran from the barn with his rifle.
“Get inside! Bar the door!”
The men fanned out, stopping just outside rifle range.
“We ain’t here for you, Morgan,” the leader called. “We got a warrant from Laramie for Clara Sims for attempted murder and theft. Give her to us and we ride out peaceful.”
“She’s not going with you.”
“Last chance.”
Eli fired first, the shot kicking dust near the leader’s horse.
The world exploded in gunfire.
Bullets thudded into the cabin walls. Eli fired from behind the water trough. Clara grabbed her Colt inside.
One man broke off toward the barn, angling for a shot at Eli’s back.
Clara saw him through the side window.
She moved to the door, lifted the bar, and stepped onto the porch.
She raised the pistol and aimed at the dirt behind his heels.
She squeezed.
The crack echoed. Dirt flew. The man spun, shouting that she was armed.
Eli fired and the man grabbed his shoulder, scrambling back.
“Clara, get in!”
They slammed the door and dropped the bar.
A bullet tore through the window. Eli grunted and stumbled.
Blood spread across his sleeve. A deep graze from shoulder to elbow.
She tore a sheet and pressed it hard against the wound.
“Sit,” she ordered.
He obeyed.
“I can’t lose you,” she whispered.
“Then don’t run,” he said. “Stay and fight.”
The siege lasted 3 hours.
The men at the corral shouted threats and fired in bursts. Eli conserved ammunition. Clara sat beside him, pistol in her lap.
A new voice called out.
“Morgan. Sheriff’s here. Hold your fire.”
Sheriff Brody rode forward with hands raised.
“They’ve got a warrant,” Brody said grimly. “Marshal Slade’s deputized the lot. He’s federal.”
“Bounty hunter with a badge,” Eli muttered.
“I can’t stop him by force,” Brody said. “But he’s agreed to a hearing in town. Judge Harland’s riding circuit. You present her. He presents the warrant. Let it be settled legal.”
“And if we refuse?”
“They burn you out.”
Eli looked at Clara.
“We’ll do it,” he said.
She nodded.
They rode into town like prisoners, Slade and his men behind them.
The saloon was cleared for the hearing. Judge Harland sat behind a heavy oak table.
Slade presented the warrant for the arrest of Clara Sims for attempted murder of Preacher Silas and theft from the Laramie Sanctuary for Wayward Women.
Mr. Davies, the clerk, testified that Clara was a sinful street girl who seduced the preacher, stole nearly 100 dollars from the poor box, and stabbed him with a fire poker when he refused her advances.
A guard repeated the story.
The lies were neat and clean.
Clara stood to speak but her voice faltered under the weight of the staring crowd.
“It was a cellar,” she said. “He hurt us. He sold us.”
“She’s mad,” Davies scoffed. “Sin broke her mind.”
The crowd murmured darkly.
Her strength evaporated under their gaze. She sank back onto the bench, trembling.
“The witnesses are credible,” the judge began. “I have no choice but to honor the warrant—”
“No.”
Eli stood.
He spoke not to the judge but to the town.
He reminded them he had lived there 10 years. That he had buried his wife and son on that land. That he had found Clara half dead, barefoot in the snow.
He described the wound beneath her collarbone. The scars at her wrists.
“You think broken means guilty?” he demanded. “You think she’s evil? Or is it a man who hunts a terrified woman for 50 dollars?”
He unbuttoned his shirt and let it fall, exposing his own scars.
“We all live in this hard land,” he said. “It breaks all of us. Some get scars outside. Some grow rot inside.”
“If she stabbed that man, I’d have given her a sharper poker.”
The silence was absolute.
Then a thin man in a black suit stood.
“My name is Arthur Sims,” he said, voice shaking. “Silas is my brother.”
A gasp rippled through the room.
“I saw the real books,” Arthur said. “It wasn’t a sanctuary. It was a pit. He sold those girls. I knew. I was afraid. But she’s telling the truth.”
“Did she stab him?” the judge asked.
“Yes. And he lived. He’s in Laramie. He wants her back. Not for justice. For punishment.”
The crowd erupted.
Slade reached for his gun but the townspeople surged forward, blocking him.
“The warrant is void,” Judge Harland declared. “Charges dismissed.”
But he warned Eli quietly: “Slade will be back. Without a warrant.”
They packed that night.
The cabin that had been a refuge was now a target.
Before dawn Eli laid a simple gold band on the table.
“I can’t offer you this ranch,” he said. “Only more running. But I’ll stand between you and all of it. Will you marry me?”
She nodded.
“You’ll never call me damaged again,” she said.
“Never.”
He slid the ring onto her finger.
They rode west at sunrise and did not look back.
Part 3
They rode west for 3 weeks across mountains and ice, following old trapper trails. Eli’s arm ached and weakened him, and Clara became the stronger partner. She made camp, dressed his wound, hunted rabbits and once a small pronghorn. She took first watch at night, Colt resting on her knee.
They descended into a green valley boxed by timbered hills and cut by a clear river.
“There,” Eli said.
A town was forming at the junction of two creeks. A sign read Willow Creek.
No one stared when they rode in. Everyone there was from somewhere else.
They bought land 10 miles upriver with the last of Eli’s gold.
He built a new cabin: two rooms, stout logs, a deep porch facing south. A fortress meant to last 100 years.
Clara broke sod for a garden twice the size of the Wyoming patch. She planted potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and bright zinnias for color.
She rode into Willow Creek and met other women living alone while husbands freighted goods. She taught them to load and fire a pistol, to bar doors, to stop bleeding, to read.
“If you pull this weapon,” she told them, “you fire to stop the threat.”
She taught letters from a small book of poetry Eli had kept.
She became Mrs. Morgan. A teacher. A woman with a name that was clean.
Eli planted three apple saplings in the yard and carved her name into the porch rail: Clara.
The first winter was hard and deep with snow. Some nights the memory returned and she woke with the scent of peppermint in her mind.
Eli was beside her now.
“You’re here, Clara,” he would whisper. “You’re safe. You’re in Willow Creek. You’re with me.”
The fear receded quickly. The five times a night were gone.
Months passed. Sometimes a month would go by without a dream at all.
One evening by the fire she drew in a sharp breath.
“It’s gone,” she whispered.
“The fear.”
She touched the brand on his shoulder.
“It’s just a scar now. It doesn’t hurt.”
He pulled her close.
They made love by the fire, slow and fierce, not from desperation but from love.
She cried afterward, tears of relief.
Spring returned.
She began to feel tired in a new way. Nauseous in the mornings. Dizzy while kneading bread.
Eli watched quietly.
He laid his hand on her belly.
“You’re not sick,” he said.
Understanding dawned.
Her body, once a place of pain, was creating life.
They stood in the center of the cabin and wept together.
Summer ripened. Her body swelled. She taught seated now, hand resting on her belly.
In the fall she sat on the porch in a rocking chair he built, heavy with child, watching the valley turn gold.
Eli carved a cradle from clean pine, cutting a small willow leaf into the headboard.
He looked at her safe on the porch of the home he had built, carrying their child.
“No one will ever take from us again,” he said.
He smiled.
The world was still hard.
But it was good.
And they were no longer running.
