Due To His SIZE DOWN THERE, Mountain Man Was Rejected By Every Woman Until Mail-Order Bride Came…

Chapter 5

Word of the new lady doctor traveled down the mountain faster than Elias would have believed.

It started small. The Peterson boy put a pitchfork tine clean through his foot, and his mother, out of pure desperation, sent him up the ridge. Clara had that wound cleaned and packed and the boy walking on a crutch within the hour. She sent him home with a poultice and instructions and a peppermint from her own pocket, and she charged the family exactly nothing.

After that, they came.

A ranch hand with a broken wrist, set so clean it healed straight as a rifle barrel. A young mother whose milk had fever in it, put right in three days. Old Mrs. Zachary, who’d had a cough for six years that three doctors had failed to name, and whom Clara listened to for a full quarter hour before quietly changing the tea she drank and watching the cough begin at last to ease.

And then, on a black night in December, came the hardest one. The one that changed everything in the valley for good.

The Hollis baby came early and came wrong—turned the way babies sometimes turn. By the time the frantic father had ridden up the mountain through the snow, his wife had been laboring a day and a night and had no more strength left to give.

Clara took one look and rolled up her sleeves and said the words that no one in that valley had ever heard said in that house before:

“Elias. I need you. I need those hands of yours, and I need them steady, and I need them now.”

And so it was that the devil of Copper Hollow—the man mothers used to frighten their children with—spent the longest night of that winter on his knees at a laboring woman’s bedside, his enormous hands doing exactly and only what Clara’s voice told them to do. Steadying. Supporting. Holding a frightened woman together through the dark.

And when, at last, near dawn, the Hollis baby came squalling red and furious into the world, it was Elias Thorne’s huge cupped palms that caught her. It was Elias Thorne’s blunt, gentle finger that the tiny new hand closed around.

Elias Thorne, who wept openly at the miracle of a life saved by the very hands the whole town had feared.

The Hollises named the girl Clara, of course they did. And her father, who had ridden up that mountain terrified of the giant on the ridge, rode back down it telling anyone who’d listen that there was no gentler pair of hands in all Montana than the ones the fools in the valley called the devil’s.