She Was Sold Beside Her Sister, The Cowboy Said “You’ll Both Have A Home With Me”

Chapter 3

He almost smiled. “Right now, a drink of water and a clean wagon seat. The rest we can settle on the road.”

True to his word, a lanky young man with sun-bleached hair appeared at the wagon with two canteens. The water was cool and tasted of tin and Wyoming grit, and it was the best thing Eliza had ever swallowed. “This is Tobias,” Garrett said. “We call him Toby. Foreman’s son.”

Toby ducked his head, embarrassed. “Ma’am.”

Eliza handed back the canteen. “My sister and I won’t be separated,” she said, her voice steadier than her legs. “That’s the first thing you should know. Whatever you plan — we stay together. Both of us.”

Garrett looked at her for a long moment, then nodded, slowly. “I wouldn’t dream of separating you, Miss—” He paused, waiting.

“Whitfield. Eliza Whitfield. This is my sister, Rose.”

“Miss Eliza. Miss Rose.” He said the names as though they mattered. “I bought your contracts, and I’m not proud of the way the law arranged that. But I bought them so you’d have a roof and honest work — and nothing more, unless you choose it. There’s a housekeeper at the Aurora, Mrs. Beale, been begging me for help for a year. And I need a hand with the ledgers that can read and write.”

Rose, who had been silent, found her voice at last, small and cracked. “You mean we’d be safe?”

Garrett’s whole face softened. “Yes, miss. You’d be safe.”

Eliza studied him — the dust on his sleeves, the calluses on his palms, the way he held his hat like a boy at his first church service. Nothing in him smelled of the men who’d been bidding. But the world had taught her hard lessons, and three hundred dollars was not a sum a man spent on strangers without a reason.

“Why?” she asked. “Why us? You could have bought good help for half that.”

He looked away, out across the dusty street, and for a heartbeat his face was a door that had just been closed. “Let’s just say I’ve watched too many good people destroyed by bad fortune. My wagon’s this way, if you’re ready to leave this place behind.”

Eliza looked at Rose. Rose looked at the wagon — at clean blankets spread over fresh hay, at a jug of water swinging in the shade. And Eliza thought of the jail cell they’d slept in last night, courtesy of a sheriff who’d felt sorry for them, and of the crowd’s laughter this morning.

“We’re ready,” she said.

The road to the Aurora ran west through prairie that rolled like a slow green sea. Wild grass brushed the wagon’s wheels, and thunderheads stood on the far horizon, white-crowned and silent. Rose fell asleep against Eliza’s shoulder somewhere in the second hour, and Eliza watched the man who had bought them ride ahead on a chestnut gelding, shoulders square, never once looking back to check his prize.

That, more than anything, troubled her.

By dusk the ranch appeared: a two-story house with warm windows, a corral, outbuildings, smoke rising like a greeting. A plump gray-haired woman came out wiping her hands on her apron and took one look at the two of them and said, “Well. You poor dears.” And then she was feeding them venison stew, and tucking them into a clean bed with a patchwork quilt, and pressing her palm to Rose’s cheek like a mother who’d been waiting.

When the lamp was out and Rose was breathing soft and even, Eliza lay awake in the strange dark, listening to the house settle, hearing the lowing of cattle, and asking herself the same question in a dozen different ways.

She could not find an answer.

And she could not find sleep until she understood the man who had paid three hundred dollars for two strangers and then ridden home with his back turned, as if he wanted nothing from them at all.