Part 3
By breakfast Clara had brought the second cup down. Daniel found it beside his when he came in from the trough, and poured the coffee before she had to ask. Sam reached between them for the bread.
The household acquired small arrangements Daniel couldn’t remember making. His gloves dried near the stove; Lucy’s clean blankets occupied a shelf once given over to account books. Clara learned which cry meant hunger and which meant the child was fighting sleep.
At first she held Lucy with her elbows tucked stiffly against her sides. Soon the baby began turning at the sound of her boots. Daniel came in one evening to find Lucy asleep against Clara’s shoulder while Clara added the day’s hay to the ledger with her free hand.
He reached to take his daughter. Clara moved the pencil away from Lucy’s face and shook her head, so he left his warmed gloves where she could put them on later and went out to finish watering.
Another afternoon, while Clara and Sam shelled beans, Sam asked why she hadn’t had children. Daniel paused in the doorway, unsure whether to interrupt or let her answer.
“There wasn’t a baby,” she said. “Thomas made the cradle before we knew.”
Sam glanced toward the sleeping room. “Lucy fits it.”
Clara kept shelling. Daniel went upstairs with the empty sack, giving her whatever privacy she could have with a child at the table.
That night Sam left his extra cornbread beside his plate, and in the morning it was still there.
Then a hard cold came down through the basin. At daybreak the outside thermometer showed twelve degrees above zero. Daniel checked the protected milk stalls and found them holding near freezing, with less wind across the bedding than there had been before the work.
The house needed five armloads of wood where Clara’s comparable old entries showed seven. The bottom hay smelled clean. He had just begun to take pleasure in those things when the water stopped.
The buried line was open.
At the trough, beyond the section he had boxed, water had remained in the metal coupling and frozen. He could hear Reed’s pencil striking it.
Clara came out carrying empty pails. Daniel showed her the joint and said, “I should have finished this.”
She looked toward the cows. “I’ll bring water from the well. You get it open.”
They worked into the night. With the cows watered, Clara held the lantern while he changed the outlet so that the trapped water could escape. They built protection around the exposed joint, keeping the insulation dry and the drainage clear, then checked the line again.
He was still kneeling there when she returned with coffee. She put one tin cup within reach, against the fence post, and waited while he tested the flow once more.
“You called me your foreman,” he said. “In front of Hollis.”
“Yes.”
“And I left you hauling water.”
She tucked her cold fingers around her cup. “Daniel, I need the pipe fixed. I don’t need you telling me all night that it ought to have been fixed yesterday.”
He drank the coffee while she held the lantern. In the morning the trough filled, the line emptied, and Clara brought the cows through. Daniel watched the last water drain before he went inside.
At the end of three weeks, Reed returned to read the ledger. On similar cold days they had burned less wood; the cattle were taking less hay, close to a fifth less by Clara’s reckoning, while the milk held steady. Since the coupling repair, the line had kept running, though they still watched the open trough for ice.
“Keep writing,” Reed said. “These are useful figures. I want to see them after a real storm.”
Hollis came that afternoon. He didn’t bother with the screen this time. Standing by the kitchen door, he told Clara that keeping his freight road available to her through winter would require something in return: spring watering for his herd on her rights.
Clara closed the ledger. “No.”
“You can’t feed cattle on a carpenter’s figures.”
“Then you won’t mind leaving us to count them.”
Daniel let her answer for her own ranch. After Hollis left, he asked how much feed they had if no wagon could come through. Nineteen days at last winter’s rate, she said, with a little more hay still stacked beyond the home yard.
“Let’s get enough beside the barn for twenty-six.”
She checked the figures again. The improved shelter might stretch the feed, but neither of them counted on that alone; over the next days they hauled the remaining hay in and set it under cover. Sam wrote twenty-six beneath the new total and drew a line so firmly that his pencil point broke.
Three days before the blizzard, Junie stood with her back to the northwest and wouldn’t go out to graze. By evening low clouds lay across the basin, and the wind dropped away. Daniel stopped making improvements and began checking what they would have to trust.
They filled the cistern, moved the cows and calves into the protected stalls, and hung spare lanterns in the passage. He set marked posts at short intervals along the routes they needed, with cloth high enough to show above a drift. Between the house and barn he stretched a guide rope. He left spare poles against the screen frames, where he could reach them without crossing open ground.
“Why both?” Sam asked, holding the bag of cloth strips.
Daniel put the boy’s mitten on the rope. “Hang on to this if you can’t see. A post tells you which way you’re moving.”
Clara brought him a stake with Thomas’s cut mark still in its side. They set it nearest the house. Daniel reinforced his repair bag with an old leather strap Anna had stitched, then checked it by pulling hard against the buckle.
Ruth stopped on her way south to relatives, leaving another jar of goat’s milk. Her glance lingered on the cups by the stove; she asked whether Clara had enough bedding, and stayed to help fold it. Daniel carried her basket back to the wagon.
Near dusk, a departing rider brought a note from Reed. Reports from farther north were bad: snow, severe cold, cattle lost in the wind. Reed urged them to get everyone under cover before it reached Cottonwood Basin.
Daniel checked the fastening on the guide rope one last time. Inside, Clara had the children at the table.
He shut the door behind him and heard the first hard grains of snow strike the wood.
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