Page 11 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
She’d eaten the last of the bread somewhere in Kansas and bought a cup of broth that tasted mostly of hot water from a vendor during the Denver transfer. Her stomach had given up complaining at around the thirtieth hour and settled into a hollow ache that lived just beneath her ribs.
And now this. A platform. A bench. A sign.
Somebody will be waiting for you,Mason’s letter had promised.
She looked left. Right. The platform stretched empty in both directions. The train huffed and groaned behind her, already pulling away, taking with it the only connection she had to anything she’d ever called familiar.
Well. Maybe he was running late. Ranchers had business to tend to and animals to mind. A man couldn’t drop everything the second a train rolled in. So, she set her carpetbag and satchel on the bench, smoothed her travel-rumpled skirt, and sat down to wait.
The sun moved.
A fly landed on her knee. She shooed it. It came back. She shooed it again. Some brown birds she couldn’t name darted between the eaves of the station’s one small building, a ticket office with its window shuttered.
She smoothed her skirt. Checked the letter again, as if the words might’ve rearranged themselves since the last time she’d read them. They hadn’t. Same handwriting. Same promise.Somebody will be waiting for you.
She counted the boards in the platform. Thirty-seven, including the cracked one beneath the bench that wobbled when she shifted her weight.
Thirty-seven boards. No wagon. No rider. No sound on that road except the wind moving through the grass like it owned the whole valley and resented her presence in it.
The thing about growing up where she’d grown up—the docks, the tenements, the men with quick hands and quicker smiles who made promises to girls with nowhere else to go—you learned what a trap looked like. Not the obvious kind, the back-alley kind, but the slow kind. The kind with a train ticket and nice handwriting and a destination so far from home that by the time you realized the whole thing stank, you’d already burned every bridge behind you.
She had no return ticket. Seventeen cents in her pocket. No address in this town, no name besides Foster, and, if the Foster ranch turned out to be a lie—or worse, real but unwanting—then she sat on a bench in a territory she couldn’t leave, with less money than it cost to eat.
Girls disappeared this way. She’d seen it in New York. The ones who answered ads, followed promises, boarded trains west, and never wrote home again. Some of them ended up fine. Some of them ended up in places she’d rather gnaw off her own hand than think about right now.
No, actually, it wouldn’t be like that. She was almost entirely sure of it. The girls who disappeared did so immediately. If the Fosters had been planning on selling her somewhere, they’d have already been here with a nice carriage and sweet smiles.
Which meant they’d just abandoned her, and she had no idea why.
Her eyes burned. She pressed the heels of her palms against them. Hard. Because Grace Linton did not cry on public benches in strange towns. She’d made that rule at twelve years old, sitting outside the grocer’s on Fulton Street after the landlord took their stove, and the rule still held.
So, options. She could sit here until dark and see if anyone came. She could look for a livery station and spend her last cents on a ride to nowhere in particular. Or she could find the ranch herself, walk straight up to the front door, and demand an explanation from whatever sorry excuse for a man had dragged her four days across the country and left her on a platform without so much as ahow-do-you-do?
The third option meant walking. The third option also meant answers, even if the answers turned out to be bad ones, and bad answers beat no answers every single time.
You got tricked, Grace Linton. You got sold a bill of goods by a stranger with nice handwriting and a train ticket, and now you’re sitting on a broken bench in the middle of Nowhere, Colorado, like a fool.
Her throat tightened. The carpetbag sat on her lap, and she gripped the handle the way she’d gripped it on the train, becauseholding something meant you stillhadsomething, and having something meant you hadn’t lost everything yet.
Seventeen cents. One carpetbag. One satchel. One letter from a stranger.
Get up, Gracie.Her mother’s voice, or the memory of it, worn thin from years of replaying.You sit still, you sink. You move, you float. Get up.
The click of a door hinge broke through the quiet.
An older, wiry man emerged from the side of the ticket building with a leather apron and a broom in one hand. He stopped when he caught sight of her, and his bushy eyebrows drew together.
“You been sittin’ there a good long while, miss. You waitin’ on somebody?”
“I’m supposed to be.” She pulled Mason’s letter from her pocket and held it out. “Do you know the Foster ranch? A man named Mason Foster wrote me this and said someone would meet me at the station.”
The worker took the letter, holding it at arm’s length and squinting the way a person did when they needed spectacles and refused to admit it.
“Foster place, sure, sure. I know it well enough. Ain’t but maybe three, four miles up the north road.”
He pointed with the broom handle toward a dirt track that wound away from the station and up into the foothills.
“Follow that road yonder ‘til you hit a creek crossin’, then bear left at the big cottonwood. Can’t rightly miss it, old gal’s been growin’ there since before my granddaddy’s time. You’ll see the fenceline after that. Got a big ol’ iron F hangin’ on the gate.”
