A year had turned the valley into something Nathaniel still had trouble believing some mornings. He stood on the porch with his coffee going cold while he looked out over the land of the ranch.

The railroad had gone the long way around in the end, the route that bastard land baron, Hollister, had never wanted to pay for. He’d wanted to cut through honest ground and take what was never his.

But that wasn’t what he’d gotten. And there was a justice in that that Nathaniel wasn’t sure he’d ever stop smiling over. 

He didn’t have any amount of sympathy for railroads or businesses that tried to take from people. 

Take from his wife.

The ranch was hers. She said it was both of theirs, but he refused to take stake in that. He’d work that land and make it everything she deserved it to be, but as far as he was concerned, that was her father’s land. That was her land. 

They’d been working it back to something grand for a couple of years now. He and Wade mostly, but Ruth did her part. 

She just couldn’t do much of the heavy lifting anymore.

He looked over to the clothesline where she hung laundry she’d already managed to wash that morning, and to the hand that gently rested atop her rounded belly. 

A child.

He was going to be a father and raise his child next to the most beautiful, glowing woman he’d ever met in his life. 

He was excited to teach the child how to do ranch chores and hunt with their new puppy, Red. 

Cass couldn’t hunt anymore, and they’d lost Job a few months back.

The old boy had gone in his sleep by the stove some time in the deep cold of the winter. He went quietly. Soundly. Just like he’d always done most things. 

There wasn’t any fussing. No suffering, either. That was what Nathaniel was most grateful for. They buried him over behind the barn next to a cottonwood tree and though Nathaniel knew the dog was there, he still found himself looking for the old boy right beside him every time he got out of bed every morning.

He sighed.

He would be lying if he said it didn’t choke him up even now. The memory hit him fresh every morning almost still to this day. 

And he wondered how long it’d be before he stopped looking for him.

Cass had gone gray around the muzzle, slow to rise most mornings the way she’d been slow since that fight at the Cut. Her ribs had never quite healed straight, which was why she hadn’t been able to hunt again.

But now the new puppy, a little runt that Ruth had taken off a neighbor’s litter that past fall, who tripped over his own feet more often than not, was learning from Cass the same way she’d learned from Job.

Nathaniel smirked. He wasn’t sure that was as much of a good thing.

Job had always been the more serious of the two of them. Cass had never quite lost that mischievousness, and he wondered how the puppy would fare in the long run.

But still, Cass was a good dog. Good heart and willingness to protect what was hers.

And that was all he could ever ask for.

Red would learn from her and hopefully get a little of Job in him. That was how life worked. One thing left to make room for the next.

“You ready to go?” he called out to Ruth. 

She grinned, nodded, and grabbed the laundry basket and held it at her hip as she walked up to the porch. 

“I’ll get the wagon ready,” he told her. “Go ahead and get your shawl.”

And that was what he did.

They had a gathering to go to for all the families that had gotten their land back from Hollister.

When they arrived, the grange was warm with too many bodies packed into too small a space, the smell of coffee and pipe smoke and wet wool hanging in the air. Families from up and down the valley had crowded in around the long tables.

He only knew a few by names. He’d never been good with names.

There were the Harmons from the north end of town. They’d bought some animals from him a couple months back. The Peterson brothers with their father. He knew them because he bought feed off of them and they’d lended a hand to rebuild some fences when they’d first gotten to the ranch and he’d still had a massive hole in his chest.

Then there was a widow he took eggs to from time to time, Mrs. Truman.

There might have only been around fifteen people in all, which wasn’t much, but it was most of what was left of the valley after everything Hollister had done to it.

The railroad men had been back time and time again.

That was the thing that had brought them all out on a cold spring evening. 

“We need somebody who can stand up in that courthouse and not get talked in circles,” said Harmon, his big hands flat on the table. “Somebody they already know they can’t push.”

“Somebody who can read a contract without getting fleeced on the fine print,” someone else said. Nathaniel thought it might have came from a Peterson brother but he couldn’t be sure. “Someone they can be afraid of.”

“Nathaniel,” someone said.

He felt Ruth’s knee press against his under the table.

He looked at the surface of the table, uneasy at first. He looked at his hands. They were rough and scarred, rope marks still on his wrists. 

“I ain’t a lawyer,” Nathaniel said. 

“Neither is the railroad man they keep sending,” Harmon said. “And he’s been doing just fine for himself.”

He looked at Ruth. She wasn’t looking back at him. She was looking down at her own hands in her lap, her mouth curved just slightly at the corner, like she was letting him find this one on his own and was only a little smug about already knowing how it was going to go.

He pushed his chair back and stood.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

And then just like that, he found himself in a whole new situation he wasn’t sure he’d ever thought he’d be in.

Lost in his thoughts, he left the meeting with Ruth, hand in hand. When they got to the wagon, he found the small of her back. 

The evening had gone warm in the way that only happened a handful of times each spring, and the pass above the north fence ran green all the way to the tree line.

“I already knew you were going to say yes,” she said.

He shook his head. He hadn’t known he was going to say yes, so the fact that she did said a lot about how easy he was for her to read now. 

The pup was asleep in the wagon bed, worn out from just the ride. 

Cass was curved around him the way she always was.

She’d taken to him, a lot like she’d taken to Ruth when she first met her. He laughed as he climbed in and offered his hand to his wife. She took it and he hoisted her up, letting her settle next to him before he took the reins fully.

She leaned into his side, her body heavier now—and warm. He put his arm around her and the say there for a bit so he could take a breath of the clean, fresh air.

He moved his hand from around her to her belly and looked at her.

“I love you,” he said.

She smiled. “I love you.”

Then he felt it—a small movement under his hand. He went still. Then it happened again.

She looked at him and laughed.

He had a name. A wife. A place around people who knew the worst of him and had decided, without much fuss about it, that the worst of him wasn’t the whole of the account.

The old watchfulness had gone out of him. 

It was about damn time of that. 

That constant thrum of readiness he’d carried every day for twelve years, waiting on some reckoning, was finally gone.

Or at least, it sat quietly until the time where it was warranted. It was quiet in the same way his evenings were out on the porch as he looked out over the valley. His valley…

His home.

THE END