I Found Her Hiding in My Wagon… She Whispered: ”Pretend I’m Your Wife Until We’re Out of Town”

Chapter 8

The door of the house opened. Rosemary came out and stood on the porch and looked at Pike with the expression of somebody who has been afraid of something for a long time, and has spent a Wyoming winter repairing curtains and caring for a mare, and has arrived at the end of the fear.

Pike looked at her. “Rosemary. Come down.”

She did not move.

“The contract — your contract,” Elias said, “was made against a debt that was manufactured to create exactly this situation, and you know it.”

Pike looked at him with the patience of a man who has been winning arguments for thirty years through the weight of his position rather than the merit of his logic. “You have no standing in this matter, Ward.”

“I have standing in anything that happens on my property,” Elias said.

Pike looked at his men. He looked at Elias. He looked at Rosemary on the porch. “Rosemary,” he said again, and his voice had changed — softer, which was worse than hard. “Your mother’s debts are real. The property is legally at risk. I have been patient. I am offering you a resolution that protects your family’s land.”

“You built the debt,” Rosemary said from the porch, and her voice was entirely steady.

Elias stepped forward and stood between her and the men on horseback. “She can have pretended to be my wife to get out of that town,” he said. He looked at Pike. He looked at the six riders. He looked at Pike again. “But she will never need to pretend anything in this house.”

“This is not your situation, Ward.”

“She’s on my property. That makes it my situation.”

“You are one man.”

“He’s not.”

The voice came from the road. Elias looked past Pike and saw three men from the valley — Tom, from the Henderson spread to the east, and the Harrow brothers from the north. Men who had seen six riders moving through the snow and had made the calculation that six riders moving together through Wyoming territory in February meant something was happening that they wanted to be near.

Pike looked at them. He looked at his own men, who wore the expression of men recalculating whether their employment was worth the situation developing in front of them. He looked at Rosemary on the porch.

Rosemary came down the steps. She reached into the collar of her dress and drew out a folded paper that had been kept against her skin since October, worn soft at the creases from being carried and reread. She was twenty-two years old, and she had spent four months in a house with a man who left notes on the kitchen table and had never once asked her for something she was not ready to give. She was done being afraid of Ambrose Pike.

“You’re right about one thing, Pike,” she said. Her voice shook a little. Her eyes were steady. “I don’t have the original notes.”

She held the paper up so it caught the light.

“But I have your letter to the creditor in Cheyenne, dated three years back. The one where you tell him what rates to write down and what rates to actually collect.”

Pike went very still.

“And Sarah Ren has the copy,” Rosemary said. “The one that’s already on its way to the territorial marshal. Reverend Cole helped her write the letter that went with it.”

Pike looked at the riders. He looked at the valley men who had appeared on the road. He looked at Elias, who had not moved from between him and Rosemary and showed no intention of moving. He looked at Rosemary and at the paper still held steady in her hand. He looked at his riders again, and he saw, in the way of a man who has built his authority on other people’s compliance, that the compliance was ending.

One of his riders had already shifted his horse to the side, putting distance between himself and the center of the situation. Another was looking at the road.

“This isn’t finished,” Pike said.

“Yes, it is,” Elias said.

Pike turned his horse. He rode. His men followed — not all at once, but in the way of men choosing a direction and finding it was not the one they had been pointing.

The yard went quiet. The Wyoming February was white and still around the Ward Ranch.

Tom called over from the road. “Everything all right, Ward?”

“Yes,” Elias said. “Thank you.”

Tom nodded and rode on. Elias turned to Rosemary. She was standing in the yard with the letter still in her hand, shaking slightly — not from cold.

“He’ll go to the marshal first,” she said, “before the marshal comes to him.”

“Yes,” Elias said.

“Will it hold? Sarah’s documents. The letter.”

“It’ll hold.” He looked at the road where Pike had gone. “It’ll hold because it’s true. True things hold.”

She looked at him. He looked at her, and then he went to check on the cattle — because the cattle needed checking, and because there were things he was going to say, and he needed to say them correctly, and he was not ready yet.

But he was almost ready.