She was staring straight ahead, her hands resting in her lap, her face pale in the twilight.
“Your father was a judge?” Elias asked softly.
Miriam was quiet for a long time. The only sound was the rhythmic clatter of the horses' hooves against the frozen earth and the creak of the wooden wagon wheels.
“Yes,” she said finally. “He was an honest man in a dishonest town. When he died four years ago, he left behind more legal debts than property. The bank took our house in Topeka. They took his law library. They took everything.”
She reached into her dark green coat pocket, pulled out the worn, folded legal envelope from Hawthorne & Bell, Attorneys at Law, and held it out to Elias.
“This is why I came west, Elias,” she whispered, her voice cracking slightly for the very first time since she had arrived in Wyoming. “It is an order of execution against my father's remaining estate. I had sixty dollars left to my name. I was thirty-one years old, too large, too plain, and too proud to work as a servant in a house where people pitied me.”
Elias took the paper, but he did not unfold it. He simply held it gently in his rough, calloused hand.
“So you wrote to the Matrimonial Exchange,” Elias said quietly.
“I wrote to a man who said he wanted a practical woman who could endure the country,” she said, turning her head to meet his eyes. Her gray eyes were shining with unshed tears, but her jaw was set firmly. “I lied to you in my mind, Elias. I let you think I was just a farm woman looking for a home. I didn't tell you that I was running away from the shame of a sheriff selling my father's chairs on the courthouse steps.”
Elias looked down at the legal paper in his hand, then looked up at her face—at the soot stain still faintly visible near her hairline, at her wide, strong hands, at the fierce, beautiful intelligence burning in her eyes.
He took the thick legal envelope, held it in both hands, and slowly, deliberately tore it in half.
Then he tore it again, and let the white scraps of paper fly out of his fingers, watching the high Wyoming wind catch them and scatter them across the endless, wild sagebrush of Sorrow Creek.
Miriam gasped, watching the paper vanish into the twilight. “Elias... what are you doing?”
“That paper belongs to Kansas,” Elias said, his voice deep, clear, and absolute. “And Kansas doesn't own a single inch of this ranch.”
He pulled the team of horses to a stop in the middle of the road. The valley around them was silent now, bathed in the deep indigo light of the approaching mountain night.
Elias turned on the wagon bench, facing her fully. He reached out his broad, calloused hand and gently took her cold, broad right hand in his own.
“When I wrote to Ruth Bell,” Elias said softly, looking directly into her eyes, “I asked for a woman who could endure this country. I was a fool, Miriam. I thought enduring meant just surviving the snow and not complaining about the cold.”
He squeezed her hand, his thumb resting against her wide knuckles.
“You didn't just endure this land, Miriam. In three weeks, you fixed my home, you tamed my wild steer, you faced down the town bullies, and you saved my father's land from a thieving banker.”
He smiled—a wide, genuine smile that cleared every dark line of loneliness from his face, revealing the man he had been before the hard years had buried him.
“I didn't get a practical wife, Miriam,” he whispered. “I got the finest, bravest partner a man ever had in this Territory. And if you'll have me... I'd like to start being a real husband to you tonight.”
Miriam looked at him, her gray eyes widening in surprise. A slow, beautiful warmth spread across her face, softening every strong line of her cheekbones, until a real, radiant smile broke across her lips—a smile that lit up the dark wagon bench like the morning sun.
“Well, Elias Ward,” she said, her voice shaking with quiet laughter as she squeezed his hand back with all her strength, “you still have a leaking roof to fix over our bed, and the chimney needs another clean before winter hits.”
“I’ll fix them tomorrow,” Elias laughed, pulling the reins to start the horses home toward the glowing light of the cabin window in the distance.
“ Tomorrow?” Miriam teased, her shoulder leaning gently against his broad arm as the wagon rolled forward into the evening. “Remember what I told you about tomorrow, husband. That’s where lazy men bury the work.”
“Not anymore,” Elias said softly, wrapping his arm around her broad shoulders as they rode home together through the snow-capped valley of Sorrow Creek. “Not anymore.”