"There's no post office between here and town," Linnet said at last.
"Kez says she'll carry them. Saturdays. She says she won't read them. I believe her." He almost smiled. "She says she's retired."
Linnet looked at the stone, and at the two words cut into it in the spacing she had chosen, and at the man standing beside it with his hat in his hands and ink still under one thumbnail from the last time he had helped her pull a proof.
"Write to me, then," she said. "And I'll write back. And we'll see what we have to say to each other, Mr. Morgan, when it's just us saying it."
The first letter came the next Saturday, in the bottom of Keziah's carpetbag, sealed with a wafer and addressed in large, laborious capitals to Miss L. Rudd, Printer, Elkhorn Siding. Keziah handed it over at the door of the shop without a word and went straight upstairs, very loudly, so there could be no question of her lingering. Linnet sat down at the imposing stone and opened it.
It was one page. The hand was square and heavy and leaned in four directions at once. Seven words were misspelled, and two were crossed out, and in one place the pen had gone through the paper. It said that the creek was up and the calves were coming well and that he had bought a new mare and did not intend to name her after anybody. It said that he thought about her more than he had any business to and did not know what to do about it except say so. It said that it was not very well put but he was going to leave it alone.
It was signed, at the bottom, in a hand that looked nothing at all like a man killing snakes: Yours honestly, N. Morgan.
Linnet read it three times. Then she took a clean sheet from the stack she kept for proofs, and dipped her pen, and sat for a long while with it over the paper, thinking what she would say to a man who had only ever said true things to her, and how she might begin.