He looked at her for one second. "Evening, ma'am." "Evening," Clara said. He went inside.
Clara stood on the porch. Three minutes later, he came back out carrying a large flour sack and two wrapped parcels, moving fast the way he'd moved going in. He got two steps past her and stopped again. He turned around.
He stood in the snow at the bottom of the porch steps and looked up at her with those gray eyes. "You all right?" "I'm fine," Clara said. "You don't look fine."
"I'm managing." He was quiet for a moment. The wind moved hard between them, throwing snow sideways. "Briggs tell you the station's locked?"
"He mentioned it." The man nodded. "And the Widow Pearson's full." Clara looked at him directly.
"You've spoken with Mr. Briggs recently." "Just now, through the window." The man shifted the flour sack to his other arm. "He was watching you stand out here."
"Figured he'd been helpful in his particular way." There was something dry in his voice, not mean, just honest. "My name's Eli Callaway. I run the Callaway Ranch about four miles north." "Clara Whitfield."
He nodded once. "You're waiting for the southbound coach?" "Whenever it runs again." "Three days," he said. "Maybe four if this storm doesn't break."
He looked up at the sky for a moment, reading something in the clouds that Clara couldn't read. "Probably four." Clara said nothing. There was nothing useful to say.
Eli Callaway set the flour sack down in the wagon bed and turned back to face her. He did not look like a man who was about to offer something. He looked like a man having an argument with himself. Then he took off his hat, shook the snow off it, and held it in his hands.
"I've got two boys at home," he said. "Six years old, both of them. My mother's been watching them while I came into town for supplies." He paused. "Their mother passed away two winters ago."
Clara waited. "I'm not—" He stopped and started again. "This isn't the kind of thing I'd normally say to a woman I just met on a porch in a snowstorm." He looked directly at her.
"But I need help at the ranch right now, more than I've needed much of anything in a long while. And you need somewhere to be for three or four days. I figure one problem can answer another if both people are decent about it." Clara studied his face.
She had spent three years in Missouri learning to read men. Which ones meant what they said. Which ones meant something else entirely. Which ones didn't know the difference.