"Men who get paid to finish what a seal starts," Thomas said. "Don't stop."
They crossed a dry creek bed half-filled with drifted snow and climbed again toward a cut where the railroad's old service road shouldered the mountain. From there the station was a thin sketch of roofs. The riders were dots that moved wrong for weather and right for purpose. One dismounted at the platform. The other kept coming along the freight road.
Thomas pulled her into the lee of a boulder. Cold came up through the stone into their spines. He listened. She listened because he did. Distant iron on stone—horseshoes finding the service road.
"Name," he said quietly.
"What?"
"Yours. If I'm going to drag a stranger through timber, I want the right word when the law asks."
She met his eyes. "Evelyn Calder. Of Philadelphia. Or what is left of Philadelphia when the money runs out and the cousins stop writing."
"Evelyn Calder," he repeated, as if testing whether the name would hold weight. "You came west on a forged proposal."
"I came west on a letter that used your name and that seal. I believed it because the handwriting was careful and the fare was paid and because I had already told myself a story about starting over. Believing was cheaper than staying."
Something in his face eased and then hardened again. "Holden Rourke uses that seal. Interlocking HR. Border text like a bank note pretending to be a crest. He owns half the claims that still pay around Galena Gulch and wants the half that don't yet. Two months ago he offered to buy my stake on the north spur. I refused. A week later a support timber failed in a drift I had checked myself the morning before. I walked out with a cracked rib and a story nobody wanted to write down. The seal on his letters looks exactly like that."
Evelyn's gloved fingers tightened on the envelope. "Then why put your name on a marriage proposal to me?"
"Because if I show up to meet a bride, I'm standing still on a platform," Thomas said. "Or because if you arrive and I don't claim you, there's a scene, and scenes make witnesses, and witnesses can be steered. Or because he wants you as leverage—someone who will swear I wrote for a wife and then abandoned her, which is a kind of smear that sticks in a town that likes its morals simple. I don't know the whole machine. I know the seal."
The hoofbeats came closer, then veered—searching, not certain. Thomas waited until they faded toward the lower switchback.
"Town is two miles if we keep the timber," he said. "Lodge first. Telegraph after. Law if the sheriff is sober and not bought. You can still take the next Eastbound when it comes through tomorrow noon. I won't stop you."