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forward to coming home. It was about time they added to their family, he’d said, and got cattle running on their part of the Triple M again.
    She’d dropped to her knees, right there on the hard-packed dirt, too stricken to stand. The mule had wandered home, and presently Doss had come looking for her. Found her still clutching that letter to her chest, her throat so raw with sorrow that she couldn’t speak.
    He’d lifted her into his arms, Doss had, without saying a word. Set her on his horse, swung up behind her and taken her home.
    â€œHannah?”
    She blinked, came back to the kitchen and the biscuit batter, the package of sausage in her hands.
    Doss was standing beside her, smelling of snow and pine trees and man. He touched her arm.
    â€œAre you all right?” he asked.
    She swallowed, nodded.
    It was a lie, of course. Hannah hadn’t been all right since the day Gabe went away to war. Like as not, she would never be all right again.
    â€œYou sit down,” Doss said. “I’ll attend to supper.”
    She sat, because the strength had gone out of her knees, and looked around blankly. “Where’s Tobias?”
    Doss washed his hands, opened the sausage packet, and dumped the contents into the big cast iron skillet waiting on the stove. “Upstairs,” he answered.
    Tobias had left the room without her knowing?
    â€œOh,” she said, unnerved. Was she losing her mind? Had her sorrow pushed her not only to absent-minded distraction, but beyond the boundaries of ordinary sanity as well?
    She considered the mysterious movement of her mother-in-law’s teapot.
    Adeptly, Doss rolled out the biscuit dough, cut it into circles with the rim of a glass. Lorelei McKettrick had taught her boys to cook, sew on their own buttons and make up their beds in the morning. You could say that for her, and a lot of other things, too.
    Doss poured Hannah a mug of coffee, brought it to her. Started to rest a hand on her shoulder, then thought better of it and pulled back. “I know it’s hard,” he said.
    Hannah couldn’t look at him. Her eyes burned with tears she didn’t want him to see, though she reckoned he knew they were there anyhow. “There are days,” she said, in a whisper, “when I don’t think I can go another step. But I have to, because of Tobias.”
    Doss crouched next to Hannah’s chair, took both her hands in his own and looked up into her face. “There’s been a hundred times,” he said, “when I wished it was me in that grave up there on the hill, instead of Gabe. I’d give anything to take his place, so he could be here with you and the boy.”
    A sense of loss cut into Hannah’s spirit like the blade of a new ax, swung hard. “You mustn’t think things like that,” she said, when she caught her breath. She pulled her hands free, laid them on either side of his earnest, handsome face, then quickly withdrew them. “You mustn’t, Doss. It isn’t right.”
    Just then Tobias clattered down the back stairs.
    Doss flushed and got to his feet.
    Hannah turned away, pretended to have an interest in the mail, most of which was for Holt and Lorelei, and would have to be forwarded to San Antonio.
    â€œWhat’s the matter, Ma?” Tobias spoke worriedly into the awkward silence. “Don’t you feel good?”
    She’d hoped the boy hadn’t seen Doss sitting on his haunches beside her chair, but obviously he had.
    â€œI’m fine,” she said briskly. “I just had a splinter in my finger, that’s all. I got it putting wood in the fire, and Doss took it out for me.”
    Tobias looked from her to his uncle and back again.
    â€œIs that why you’re making supper?” he asked Doss.
    Doss hesitated. Like Gabe, he’d been raised to abhor any kind of lie, even an innocent one, designed to soothe a boy who’d lost his father and feared, in the