Caleb's advertisement had been short. She could still recite it. Rancher, Albany County, Wyoming Territory, thirty-four, sober, owns his land and two hundred head, seeks a wife of good sense and temper who is not afraid of hard work or quiet. Will answer all letters honestly. And then an address, in care of the post office at Elkhorn Siding.
"It was the last line," she said. "Will answer all letters honestly. Nobody puts that in. They put in that they're handsome or that they have a piano. I thought, here's a man who's been lied to and is tired of it. I thought I could talk to a man like that."
Nehemiah made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Caleb didn't write that ad."
"No?"
"Caleb didn't write anything, I told you. But he'd have said it. That part's him. He was the most honest man I ever knew, and it never once did him any good." He rubbed his jaw. "Go on."
The first letter had come in January, in reply to hers. It was not long. It thanked her for writing and said that he had received eleven letters and hers was the only one that had made him laugh, on account of the part where she said she could not cook anything that required a recipe but could set the recipe itself in eight-point Bourgeois with no errors. It described the ranch: a log house with a board addition, a barn, a spring that never froze, a creek called the Little Bitter that was not bitter at all in his opinion, only cold. He said he lived there with his brother, who was the better rider and the worse talker. He said he had a bad left hand from a rope burn when he was nineteen and that she should forgive the writing.
"His left hand," Nehemiah said. "He was left-handed. That's true. The rope burn's true. He couldn't close the last two fingers. Whoever wrote that knew him."
"Whoever wrote that," Linnet said, "wrote with a very good right hand." She held up the letter. The writing was upright and even, the loops on the l's and h's regular as fence posts, a schoolroom hand, but a good schoolroom, a careful one. "I wondered about it. I thought he must have learned to write with the other hand after the burn, and worked at it, and that was why it looked so careful. I liked him better for it."
The letters had come every two or three weeks after that, all through the late winter and into the spring. They talked about weather and cattle and the price of beef at Omaha. They talked about books, which surprised her: he said he did not read much himself but that he was fond of having things read to him, and asked whether she had ever read a book called Ivanhoe, and when she said she had, he wanted to know whether she thought Rebecca was treated fairly in the end. She had written four pages on Rebecca. He had written back that she had changed his mind.