"I'm aware of that," Clara replied.
"I have a ranch. I needed someone to run the kitchen and keep the house from falling apart before spring. That's it. I wasn't looking for..."
He stopped.
He was going to say a family, but the word felt too pointed with four children standing five feet away.
"I wasn't looking for anything beyond that."
"I understand what you weren't looking for."
Her voice had gone quieter, but harder.
The kind of quiet that meant the softness was a decision, not a natural state.
"The question is what you intend to do about it, because I don't have the money to take four boys back to Denver, and the last place we left doesn't exist for us anymore."
That landed somewhere uncomfortable in Gideon's chest.
He looked at the boys again.
The oldest was still watching him.
The second one, maybe 10, with wire-rimmed glasses slightly too big for his face, had crouched down next to the smallest and was helping him straighten that ridiculous sideways hat.
The third boy, the one in between them in age, just stood with his hands in his coat pockets, looking at the mountains like he was already memorizing the landscape.
Gideon had been raised by a man who believed that a hard winter didn't care about your feelings, and neither should you.
He'd lived by that rule his entire adult life.
He wasn't soft.
He wasn't sentimental.
He'd buried his wife and kept the ranch running and hadn't cried in front of another human being in three years.
But he also wasn't the kind of man who left a woman and four children stranded on a train platform in November.
"How old are they?"
He heard himself ask.
Clara blinked.
She hadn't expected that.
"Ethan is 13, Caleb is 10, Miles is eight, and Noah just turned six."
He put his hat back on.
"The ranch is 40 minutes out," he said. "Cold ride. You'll want to keep the youngest one wrapped."
Clara looked at him for a long moment.
Something crossed her face that he couldn't fully read.
Relief mixed with something more guarded, like she wasn't sure whether to trust the reprieve.
"This isn't a permanent solution," he added quickly. "We'll write to the agency, sort out what happened, figure out..."
"Yes," she said. "We will."
Neither of them moved for a beat.
Then Noah, the six-year-old, looked up at Gideon from beneath his sideways hat and said very seriously, "Are you the rancher?"
Gideon looked down at him.
"I am."
"Do you have horses?"
"Several."
The boy's face split into a grin with the gap at center, and Gideon felt something shift almost imperceptibly in the stiffness of his own expression.
He didn't smile back.
But it was a near thing.
The ride to the ranch was exactly as cold as promised and twice as quiet as it needed to be.
Clara sat up front beside Gideon on the wagon bench, her bags stacked in the back, where the three older boys huddled together under a single wool blanket.
Noah had, without asking anyone's permission, wedged himself between his mother and Gideon, as though he had simply decided that's where he belonged.
Gideon had no idea how to respond to that, so he did nothing and focused on the road.
The landscape opened up as they left Cheyenne.
Flat stretches of pale grass dusted white at the edges.