Nobody in the Harland house slept much that night. Ellie sat by the window with the baby, watching the road. Molly slept in her new boots because she said they might need to run. And Wade sat on the porch with a rifle across his knees, the way he had sat outside a hundred camps on the Staked Plains, listening to the rain and waiting for morning. Thaddeus Greer, attorney for Mr. Lucius Vance.
I have a court order for the child. Harlon. Captain Wade Harland, Company D, Texas Rangers. That was a long time ago. You sent my brother to Huntsville.
He died there. Then you know how this ends, Deacon. Take Sam up to the loft. Don't come down. Whatever you hear.
Drop it, Pike. Signed April 9th. Judge Kittredge was buried April 2nd. I was at the funeral. Henry wrote this the night before he went down that shaft.
He knew my children are to remain with their mother. My father is not to raise them as he raised me. Within the month, Thaddeus Greer was disbarred in three states. Deacon Pike went to Canyon City for 12 years. And Lucius Vance, who had bought every judge in Lake County, found that a dead son's letter was the one thing his money could not buy back.
In Cedar Bluff, the story went around the way stories do. By Sunday, half the town had heard that Wade Harland stood at his gate in the rain against three hired guns. The other half had heard about the boots. Mr. Hobbs sent a sack of sugar out to the ranch with his compliments and did not send a bill. The storm blew itself out a little after midnight.
When the last rider was gone and the house was quiet again, Ellie fell asleep at the kitchen table, still holding Henry's letter. Wade put his coat around her shoulders and sat across from her until the window turned gray. For the first time in three years, he did not want the night to end too fast. You don't have to. It's waited long enough.
Mr. Wade, can we stay till the rain stops? Rain stopped. Molly stay. Anyway, they were married in June in the little white church on Main Street with Molly in her new boots throwing wild flowers at everyone, including the preacher. Mrs. Wickham was not invited.
Nobody missed her. And on stormy nights from then on the lamp in the Harland window stayed lit till morning in case anyone else came knocking. Sam Harland, he took Wade's name the year he turned six, grew up to wear a silver star of his own. People who knew him said he never once turned away a stranger at the door. When they asked him why, he said his father had taught him, and that his father had learned it one stormy night in the spring of 1881 from a woman, a little girl, and a baby who only asked to sleep in the barn.