The Mountain Man Started Buying Baby Clothes — But Everyone Knew He Lived Alone
Chapter 2
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"The doll is for a girl who is eight," he added with what might have been embarrassment. "I believe."The Monday after, it was a bigger girl's dress in blue, two hairbrushes, and a box of ribbons in every color she had. He also asked whether the store sold a cradle."There is one in the catalog: $6 from Denver. It would take a month.""I will make it.""Have you ever made one?""No."Clara looked at him for a moment. Then she took down a bolt of soft cotton flannel. "For the little one," she said. "It washes well and does not scratch. And the pink dress is a size too small by spring. Take the yellow as well."Thad took them both.The trouble was that Clara could not keep a thing to herself. She had said one small word to Wilbur Hatch in confidence, and in Alder Gap, a small word grows. By Sunday, the preacher's wife, Mrs. Hollis, had it, and the congregation had settled the matter between the first hymn and the last:He had a wife hidden on the mountain. He had a child by some woman in another territory. Something was wrong up there, and a respectable town ought to send somebody to look."Send who?" said Clara from the back pew. She had come to church for the first time since Easter to see what they would say. "You?""A man like that," said Mrs. Hollis, "has something to hide.""A man like that," said Clara, "is buying a dress. I have sold dresses to men before. I did not send for the sheriff."She did not mention the ribbons, or how the big man had stood ten minutes over the yarn, turning a skein of green in his fingers as if it might go off. And she felt a little as though she had started something she had no way of stopping.Nobody in town knew it had begun with a letter. It was the first letter Thad had received since Daniel Whitmore's Christmas note. It waited in the post office window at the depot on Saturday, the 8th of September: a thin envelope with a Colorado Springs postmark and his name in large, uneven letters, some of them backward.He read it on the platform standing up. He read it again at the top of the ridge where the trail turns into the pines. It had been written on the 2nd of September by a girl of eight called Lucy Whitmore. She and her mother, Hannah, lived on a small homestead on the plains, three days from the mountains.Her father, Daniel, had died in June of a fever that came on after a week of haying. He had left a mortgage, a debt at the feed store, and a wife who was expecting a second child.Nine years before, on a bitter December day in 1879, Thad had gone through the ice of Elk Creek with a pack on his back. The current pulled him under the shelf. A young freighter driving the road heard him shout, lay flat on the ice with a rope, and pulled him out by the collar. Daniel had left half a finger in that creek. He said afterward it was a fair price for a friend.