The westbound Union Pacific put Linnet Rudd down at Elkhorn Siding at eleven minutes past four on the afternoon of the ninth of October, 1882, and then, as if embarrassed to have stopped at all, it pulled away again before she had finished counting her bags.
There were three. A carpetbag that had been her mother's, a pasteboard hatbox tied with a ribbon she had ironed the night before she left, and a small leather case with brass corners that held the only things she owned outright: a composing stick, a set of type tweezers, a folded apron stiff with old ink, and nineteen letters tied in two bundles with kitchen string. The letters were the reason she was standing on a plank platform in the Wyoming Territory with the wind pulling at her skirts. The composing stick was the reason she had been able to bear reading them more than once.
She set the case down between her feet, where she could feel it against her ankles, and looked around.
Elkhorn Siding was a water tank, a depot painted the color of dried mustard, a stock pen, a row of false-fronted buildings along a street that was mostly ruts, and beyond that a great deal of nothing that went on to the edge of the world and then, she suspected, a little past it. The grass was the color of a lion. The sky was enormous and indifferent and so clean it hurt her eyes. Somewhere a windmill was turning with a sound like a door that needed oil.
Caleb Morgan had written that he would meet the train himself. He had written it in the eighteenth letter, in the careful upright hand she had come to know as well as her own, and he had underlined the word himself, so that she would understand he was not sending a hand or a neighbor. I will be on the platform, Miss Rudd. Myself. You will know me because I will be the one who is nervous.
There was only one man on the platform, and he did not look nervous. He looked like a man who had been told bad news so long ago that it had worn into him, like a creek into rock. He was tall and spare, somewhere past thirty, in a brown canvas coat and a hat that had been rained on too often to keep its shape. He had been leaning against the depot wall with his arms folded when the train came in, and he had straightened when she stepped down, and now he was walking toward her slowly, the way a man walks toward a horse he does not want to startle.
He stopped a little more than an arm's length away and took off his hat.
"Ma'am," he said. "Are you Miss Linnet Rudd? From Pennsylvania?"