Adelaide booked passage on the next eastbound coach scheduled for the following morning, wrote a short, genuinely apologetic letter for Nate Holt explaining her decision as best she could, and asked Josie, as the only person in town she'd had any real chance to trust that day, whether she would be willing to deliver it. Amos, the Holt ranch foreman who had driven the outbound wagon that morning, had taken a glancing wound to the arm during the same ambush and was in no shape to make the return trip himself that evening, laid up instead at the doctor's office getting properly stitched. Someone needed to carry both the wagon and the news back out to the Holt place before dark. And Josie, standing on that boardwalk with Adelaide's letter in one hand and a stranger's confiscated rifle in the other, found herself the only person left standing who could reasonably do it. "I'll take the wagon out myself," she told the stage agent, already moving toward the horses before he'd finished arguing that a woman riding alone after an attempted robbery seemed like poor judgment on a day that had already produced enough of it.
"Nate deserves to hear this from someone he knows rather than a stranger's letter arriving cold. And frankly, Cyrus, I'd rather be moving than sitting here thinking about how close that shot came to Miss Prescott's window. She never did set the bouquet down properly on the drive out, too occupied managing a spooked team with one hand while keeping the confiscated rifle within easy reach with the other. And by the time she reached the Holte gate, the once careful arrangement of prairie asters had traveled nine additional miles pressed against a wagon seat, considerably worse for the journey, but, Josie would reflect later, not nearly as worse for it as she had been. "What?"
Nate heard, standing on his own porch with the full account finally laid out in front of him. Nate Holte found his reaction arriving in an order that surprised him considerably. His first thought was relief, plain and immediate, that Adelaide Prescott had survived a robbery attempt without physical harm. His second thought, following close behind and lingering considerably longer, was something closer to alarm at how narrowly Josie herself had come through a gunfight against three armed men with nothing but her own nerve and a working knowledge of the ground. "You could have been killed," he said, and heard, even as the words left him, how inadequate they sounded set against what she'd actually done.
Three men, Josie. You rode straight at three armed men alone. I rode at the ground that gave me the best angle on three armed men, she corrected, with the particular patience of someone explaining tactics to a man who had clearly never had to think through them under fire. There's a considerable difference, Nate, and the difference is the reason I'm standing here telling you about it instead of one of us lying out past Antelope Ridge. He read Adelaide's letter twice, standing there in the fading light, and found in it exactly the honest, unembarrassed regret he might have expected from the careful, thoughtful correspondent her earlier letters had described.
There was no anger in him reading it, only a strange, quiet acknowledgement that a woman he had never actually met had made a reasonable choice about a life she'd correctly judged she wasn't ready for, and that whatever disappointment he might have felt an hour earlier had already been almost entirely crowded out by his continued circling worry over the woman who had ridden nine miles to deliver that news personally. "Come inside," he said finally. "You've had considerably worse of a day than I have, whatever letter I just finished reading, and you're not getting back on a horse tonight until you've eaten something and let me look at that sleeve." The tear in her sleeve, it turned out, sat over a shallow graze along her forearm. She hadn't mentioned once in the entire retelling a wound she had apparently judged not worth the words it would have taken to explain, and Nate's hands were not entirely steady cleaning and binding it properly at his kitchen table, a fact Josie noted without comment beyond a faint, tired smile that told him she'd noticed considerably more than she was saying.
The Winchester Josie had carried up his steps turned out, once the county sheriff rode out the following morning to collect a full statement to belong to a man named Dutch Farrow, a former Holt ranch hand Nate had fired 18 months earlier for running cattle off the herd count and selling them quietly to a buyer two counties over. Farrow had sworn revenge at the time in the loud, empty way men often did when caught and dismissed rather than prosecuted. And Nate had genuinely given the threat no further thought since, assuming, reasonably enough, that a man who'd gotten off with only the loss of his job had little appetite for real trouble. He's been running with two others since spring, working the stage road specifically because he knows this country and knows the schedule, the sheriff explained, laying out what little his office had already pieced together. Three hold-ups since autumn, all along this same stretch, and yesterday's the first time anybody's actually put a bullet in one of them.
He's laid up somewhere close, wounded bad enough he can't be moving fast, which gives us a window we haven't had before. Nate's jaw set in a way Josie recognized from childhood. The particular stillness that meant he'd already decided something and was simply working through how to say it. If Farrow's holding a grudge against this ranch specifically, and he chose yesterday's coach knowing it was carrying my intended bride, then this isn't only the sheriff's trouble to settle. I want to ride with your posse, and I want Josie riding with us, given she's the only one among us who's actually faced the man and lived to describe how he moves under fire.
The sheriff looked between them for a long moment, weighing an unconventional request against the plain fact that Josie Larkin had already proven the previous afternoon considerably better judgment under pressure than most men twice her experience, and finally nodded once gruffly, the closest thing to agreement the moment was going to produce. "Pharaoh's wound will have him hold up close, likely at that line shack out past the Cimarron breaks he used to work when he rode for you, Holt. If Miss Larkin's willing to ride out and point us toward it, I won't turn away help that good on principle." What Cottonwood Bend said news of the failed robbery and the abandoned engagement traveled through Cottonwood Bend with the particular speed small towns reserved for stories that combined danger and romance in equal measure, and Josie found herself, over the following days, the subject of considerably more attention than she generally cared for. Some of it was admiring, older ranchers who'd known her father stopping her outside the mercantile to say plainly that Sam Larkin would have been proud watching his daughter handle a gunfight with that kind of steadiness.
Some of it carried the familiar undertone she'd grown used to hearing across her years running her own family spread, a faint skepticism dressed up as concern. Women half her mother's age wondering aloud whether a young woman ought to be riding stage scout duty at all, given what had very nearly happened out past Antelope Ridge. "You did what needed doing," her own mother told her simply, the evening she finally sat down long enough to hear the whole account properly, "and you did it well enough that a stranger's bride is alive to write apologetic letters instead of grieving ones. I'm not have you second-guessing good work on account of townsfolk who weren't there to see it done. Ruth Larkin had buried a husband and raised a daughter alone across 11 hard years on that ranch and had earned, in Josie's estimation, considerably more right than most to an opinion on what capable women were and weren't permitted to do in that country.
Josie's own accounting of the day, given honestly rather than for anyone's comfort, was that she had not felt brave in the moment so much as simply occupied, too busy reading angles and reloading to spend any attention on fear until well after the danger had passed. It was only lying awake that first night, replaying how close Pharaoh's return shot had come to her own shoulder rather than the empty rock it actually struck, that the full weight of what might have happened finally caught up with her, arriving late the way real fear so often did, well after the moment that had earned it. Nate rode over to the Larkin place 3 days after the ambush, ostensibly to check on her arm and thank her family properly for the risk she'd taken on his behalf, though both of them understood by the time he'd been sitting on the Larkin porch the better part of an hour past any reasonable excuse for staying, that the visit had stopped being about gratitude fairly early on. "I keep turning it over," he admitted, watching her work a stiff hinge on the porch swing rather than look at him directly. "20 years I've known you, Josie, close enough to call you a friend without ever once thinking past that word, and it took a stranger's bullet coming within a hand's width of your shoulder to make me understand what I'd have actually lost if it had landed differently."
"You're allowed to have been slow noticing, she said, finally glancing up. Something careful and testing in her expression that hadn't been there during the crisis itself, when there hadn't been room for anything but action. I wasn't exactly announcing anything either, if I'm honest about it. Easier to be neighbors than to risk making it strange between our families if I'd said something and you hadn't felt the same. I'm saying something now, he told her, plainly enough that there was no mistaking his meaning for ordinary neighborly concern.
Whatever comes of chasing down Pharaoh and his partners, I'd like permission to keep calling on you afterward. Properly this time, not because a coach got robbed and forced the question, but because I find I'd like to know you considerably better than 20 years of being neighbors ever actually let me. She gave him that permission plainly, without the careful hedging either might have offered a week earlier, and the ride out to the Cimarron breaks a few days later carried, for both of them, a different weight than the sheriff's business alone accounted for. Two people riding toward danger together, already reasonably certain what they intended to do once it was safely behind them. Amos's account.
Amos Whitfield, recovering at the doctor's office with his wounded arm bound tight against his chest, gave his own statement to the sheriff 2 days after the ambush. And it was his careful recollection, more than anyone else's, that finally settled the question of exactly why Pharaoh had chosen that particular Tuesday coach out of the dozens running that route each month. "He was watching the depot the week prior," Amos said, working through the memory slowly against the dull ache of his stitched arm. I noticed a rider out past the livery a few different mornings. Kept to himself.
But I recognized the way he sat a horse even from that distance. On account of I'd worked alongside him plenty. Back when Mr. Holt still had him on payroll. Didn't think much of it at the time beyond a vague itch of familiarity. Wish now I'd said something sooner.