Chapter 1 - Dust, Seven Children, and One Desperate Advertisement
By the time Josiah Caldwell placed an advertisement for a wife, he had stopped caring what anyone in Cheyenne thought of him.
Pride required energy.
Josiah had none left.
At thirty-eight, he looked ten years older. Wind had carved permanent lines around his eyes. Wyoming sun had browned his face almost to leather. His hands were cracked from reins, wire, axes, frozen water pumps, and every other job a ranch owner with no money had to do himself.
But hard work was not what had nearly defeated him.
His seven children were.
Two years earlier, Josiah's wife, Abigail, had died after a winter illness swept through the territory. She had gone from coughing beside the stove to being buried beneath frozen ground in less than three weeks.
Everything afterward had come apart.
The Broken Spur Ranch had never been rich, but while Abigail lived it had been a home.
There had been bread cooling near the window.
Clean shirts folded beside beds.
Stories after supper.
Children who occasionally remembered that human beings did not belong on roofs.
After Abigail died, those same children became a storm Josiah could not control.
Wyatt, fourteen, decided that being the oldest made him a second father even though he barely knew how to control himself.
Sadi, twelve, became suspicious of every adult woman who entered the house.
Cole and Jasper, ten-year-old twins, discovered that almost anything became entertaining if it exploded, collapsed, or frightened livestock.
Mave, eight, followed the twins whenever she should not.
Pearl, six, cried when angry and bit when frightened.
And four-year-old Emmett had developed the habit of carrying pieces of leather in his pockets and chewing them when nervous.
They had driven away three housekeepers.
The first lasted nine days.
The second lasted four.
The third left without collecting her wages.
The townspeople considered this extremely amusing.
Josiah did not.
The Broken Spur was already sliding toward ruin. Fence posts leaned drunkenly across the western pasture. The barn roof leaked. Two cattle had wandered through a broken section of wire and disappeared into neighboring grazing land.
The ranch house looked as exhausted as its owner.
One August afternoon, Josiah entered the Cheyenne newspaper office with dust on his boots and humiliation in his throat.
The young clerk behind the counter looked up.
"Advertisement?"
"Yes."
"Livestock?"
"No."
"Land?"
"No."
The clerk waited.
Josiah removed his hat.
"A wife."
The clerk stared.
Josiah stared back.
Ten minutes later, the advertisement was finished.
It was not romantic.
Josiah had no talent remaining for romance.
He wanted a woman capable of cooking, cleaning, surviving an isolated ranch, and facing seven children who seemed determined to destroy civilization one prank at a time. He offered transportation to Cheyenne and admitted he had little money.
He did not mention beauty.
He did not ask for elegance.
He did not promise affection.
He needed survival.
When Josiah returned to town the following week, half of Cheyenne seemed to know.
Gertrude Finch certainly did.
Gertrude considered herself the unofficial guardian of community morality, though most people privately believed she simply enjoyed knowing everyone else's business before breakfast.
She stood outside the mercantile when Josiah tied his horse.
"I hear you're ordering yourself a wife."
Josiah kept walking.
"Morning, Gertrude."
"I suppose that's easier than finding one willing to come voluntarily."
Josiah stopped.
For a heartbeat, irritation sharpened his exhausted expression.
Then he merely said, "You have yourself a pleasant day."
Gertrude smiled.
She knew she had won because tired men rarely had the energy to argue.
Weeks passed.
No answer came.
Then another week.
Josiah began considering something he had sworn never to consider.
The county orphanage.
The thought sickened him.
He loved his children.
That was precisely the problem.
Love did not automatically create food, order, money, or enough hours in the day.
One evening, he returned from checking cattle and found Cole sitting on top of the chimney.
"Why?"
Josiah stood in the yard, looking upward.
Cole shrugged.
"Wanted to know if I could climb it."
"You can."
"Yes."
"Come down."
"Can't."
An hour later, Josiah finally lowered the boy with a rope.
Inside the kitchen, Sadi had burned beans.
Jasper had spilled lamp oil.
Pearl was screaming because Mave had cut the hair off her rag doll.
Emmett was asleep beneath the table.
Wyatt was nowhere to be found.
Josiah stood in the middle of the room.
Something inside him simply stopped.
Not broke.
Stopped.
He sat in Abigail's old chair and stared at the wall while chaos continued around him.
Sadi noticed first.
"Pa?"
Josiah rubbed his face.
"I'm tired."
None of them answered.
Their father complained sometimes.
He became angry.
He shouted.
But he never sounded like that.
"I'm just..." He swallowed. "I'm tired, Sadi."
For one small moment, the twelve-year-old looked afraid.
Then hoofbeats sounded outside.
Wyatt entered through the front door five minutes later carrying two rabbits.
Josiah looked at him.
"Where were you?"
"Hunting."
"I told you not to go alone."
"We needed meat."
Something in Wyatt's tone made Josiah pause.
The boy's face was still young beneath the grime.
Too young.
Yet grief had made all of them older in the wrong ways.
That night, after the children slept, Josiah sat at the table beside a smoking lantern.
He unfolded the newspaper.
His advertisement looked absurd printed between a notice for farm equipment and a reward for a missing horse.
He almost laughed.
Instead, he lowered his forehead onto his hands.
"Abigail," he whispered into the empty kitchen, "I don't know how to do this."
The house gave no answer.
Three days later, one came through the mail.
The envelope was thick and plain.
The handwriting was bold.
The sender lived in Chicago.
Josiah opened it while standing outside the post office.
Her name was Clementine Dawson.
She wrote directly.
She had no objection to hard work.
She knew how to cook for large numbers of people.
She had helped raise three brothers.
She was accustomed to being underestimated.
Then came the sentence that made Josiah blink.
You mentioned seven difficult children. Children are rarely difficult without reason. I would prefer meeting them before agreeing that they are devils.
Josiah read it twice.
The letter continued.
She described herself as a woman of substantial size and strong constitution.
There was no apology in the wording.
No embarrassment.
She asked only three questions.
Was the marriage lawful?
Would she have authority over the household?
Would Josiah strike her or the children?
His reply went out that afternoon.
Yes.
Yes.
Never.
He enclosed the train fare.
Two weeks later, the entire Caldwell household knew someone was coming.
The children were not pleased.
"She'll leave," Wyatt said.
They were sitting in the loft.
"Probably," Jasper agreed.
"How long?" Cole asked.
Sadi crossed her arms.
"Three days."
"Five," Mave guessed.
Pearl looked worried.
"What if she stays?"
Six heads turned toward her.
Wyatt's expression hardened.
"She won't."
He did not tell them why he needed that to be true.
Every woman who entered their home reminded him of his mother.
Every woman who left reminded him that she was gone.
He could survive the first pain.
He did not want another.
At sunrise the next morning, Josiah shaved.
It was the first time he had done so in weeks.
Sadi watched him from the doorway.
"Why are you doing that?"
"Going to town."
"We know."
Josiah looked at his reflection.
"Then why'd you ask?"
"Because you're shaving."
He sighed.
"People shave."
"You don't."
"I do sometimes."
"No."
Josiah turned.
Sadi's eyes narrowed.
"You trying to impress her?"
"No."
"Good."
She walked away.
At the depot in Cheyenne, the August heat shimmered over the tracks.
Josiah waited with his hat in both hands.
People noticed him.
Then Gertrude Finch noticed him.
By the time the whistle sounded in the distance, several townspeople had invented reasons to stand near the platform.
The locomotive appeared through a haze of smoke.
Josiah's stomach tightened.
For the first time since sending the money, the enormity of what he had done became real.
A stranger was arriving.
A woman who had agreed to marry a man she had never met.
A woman who believed she could manage seven children who had defeated everyone else.
The train slowed.
Steam rolled across the platform.
Doors opened.
Passengers descended.
A businessman.
An elderly couple.
Two soldiers.
A mother holding a sleepy child.
Josiah scanned every face.
Then a large leather trunk appeared in the doorway of the final passenger car.
A gloved hand gripped its handle.
The trunk moved downward.
A woman followed it.
The conversations around the station became quieter.
Josiah Caldwell forgot to breathe.
Because Clementine Dawson had arrived.
And before the day was over, every person watching that platform would have an opinion about her.
None of them understood yet that this woman had crossed half a continent carrying far more than a trunk.
She had brought the one thing the Broken Spur Ranch had almost completely lost.
A plan.
May you like
And the first people foolish enough to test that plan would be seven children waiting for her at home.
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