What happens to the woman is no concern of mine. Wade, this came from Leadville yesterday. They say she stole her own son. Papers say the court gave the boy to the old man. Papers say she's unfit.
I've never seen papers that could tell me who a mother is. Wade Lucius Vance owned half the silver in Leadville and every judge who mattered. His only son, Henry, had died under a fallen beam in a shaft his father refused to brace. Henry left behind a wife the old man never wanted, a daughter he never visited, and a son, a boy was something Lucius Vance could use. Woman with a baby, red hair, little girl came through in the rain.
A lot of folks come through in the rain, mister. $500 says somebody remembers. Try the Harland place. The one with the lamp in the window. Edna Wickham would tell herself afterwards that she had only been doing her Christian duty. Nobody in Cedar Bluff ever quite believed her.
Henry Vance, your husband, his father wants Sam, not me. Not Molly. He had a doctor sign a paper that says I'm I'm not right in the head. There's a place in Denver for women like that. They don't come out.
So, you walked 40 miles. Molly carried the bag the last 10. You're not walking out into the rain again, Ellie. They'll burn your house down to get him. Then they'll have to come through the gate first.
He didn't tell her what he had been before he was a rancher. He didn't tell her about the badge in the bottom of his trunk or the name men in Texas still said quietly. He only took the lantern from her hand and walked her back to the house. Before Colorado, there had been Texas 11 years with Company D of the Frontier Battalion from the Rio Grande to the Staked Plains. He had ridden after cattle thieves and murderers and men who burned homesteads for sport, and he had brought most of them back.
When Anna married him, she asked for one thing, that he put the badge away for good. He had kept that promise for 9 years. He looked at it a long time that night. Then he loaded the colt and put the badge back in the trunk. And God bless Mama and Sam and Mr. Wade.
Even though he doesn't smile much and please make the rain stop, but not too fast. The rain did not stop. It came back harder the next afternoon. Black clouds rolling over the ridge from the west. And with it down the valley road came a closed buggy and three riders in long slickers.
Wade knew the man in the black hat by reputation. In Texas, they called him Deacon because he liked to quote scripture. Wade had put his younger brother in Huntsville prison in the summer of 72. A man like Deacon Pike did not forget a thing like that. Neither did Wade.