The Wyoming wind did not blow so much as it scoured. It carried the grit of three territories, picking up alkali dust and the dried husks of sagebrush to hurl them against the rough-hewn logs of the sweetwater stage stop. To the west, the mountains were not majestic purple sentinels, but jagged teeth biting into the belly of a sky that was too blue, too vast, and entirely indifferent to the humans who tried to live beneath it. Eli Mercer leaned against the hitching post. the wood smooth and gray under his gloved hand. He adjusted the brim of his hat, squinting against the glare, the pain in his left leg, the legacy of a horse that had panicked in a drift three winters back, throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache.
It made him feel older than his 34 years. It made him feel worn down, like the fence posts that lean drunkenly along the road to town. He was waiting for a wife. The notion sat in his gut like a stone he had swallowed and could not digest. He had not wanted this.
He had told himself for 5 years that he was done with the softness of women, done with the terror of loving something that this country could snap in half with a single blizzard. But the ranch was failing. The house was falling into a silence so deep it rang in his ears. And he needed help. A partner, a woman to manage the accounts and the hens and the emptiness while he tried to keep the cattle alive.
The stagecoach appeared first as a brown smudge on the horizon, a darker bruise against the tan earth. Then came the sound, a low rumble that grew into the clatter of wheels and the heave of exhausted horses. Eli straightened, brushing the dust from his vest. He had worn his Sunday black coat, though the seams were white with wear and the elbows shone. He felt foolish.
He felt like a man walking to the gallows who had bothered to polish his boots. The coach lurched to a halt in front of the station, the driver spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt before wrestling the brake lever. The door swung open and a cloud of dust billowed out, followed by a salesman with a sample case, a miner headed for the hills, and finally her. Maggie Orr stepped down into the Wyoming dirt. She was not what he had pictured.
The letters had been practical, penned in a neat, cramped hand that spoke of sewing skills and a willingness to work. He had expected someone sturdy, perhaps a widow with a thick waist and red hands of a farm wife. Maggie was thin. That was the first thing he noticed. She was slender in a way that spoke of city hunger, not country lean.
Her dress was a dark gray wool, neat and mended, but too heavy for the heat and too fine for the brush. She turned to look at the driver handing down her trunk, a single battered thing with brass corners that had seen better days, and Eli saw her profile. It was sharp, pale, and possessed of a terrified grace. He stepped forward, his boots crunching on the gravel. "Miss Oor," he said, it was not a question.
His voice sounded rusty to his own ears. She turned. Her eyes were green. the color of the moss that grew on the north side of the creek stones, but they were shadowed by something dark and frantic. She looked at him, taking in the scar that cut through his left eyebrow, the dust on his coat, the stiffness of his stance. Mister Mercer, she replied.
Her voice was low with a distinct lift of the Irish tenements, though she tried to flatten it. I am Eli Mercer. I am Margaret Maggie. She held out a hand. It was not the soft hand of a lady of leisure, nor the broad hand of a dairy maid.
It was small, but the fingers were roughened. The tips pricked and calloused. Needle scars, factory hands. He took her hand for a second, feeling the tremors in her skin, and then released it as if he had been burned. The silence that followed was heavy.
The wind filled it, whistling through the spokes of the wagon wheels. Let us get your trunk," Eli said abruptly. "The horses are restless. " Maggie watched him heave the heavy trunk onto the back of his buckboard wagon. She clutched her reticule with both hands, her knuckles white internally. She was fighting the urge to turn around and climb back into the stagecoach.