Micah lowered his eyes.
Clara looked toward the basket.
“I can keep Daniel.”
The clerk’s face changed.
“You?”
“I know how to feed him.”
“You are six years old.”
“I know.”
“He needs more care than you can give.”
Clara swallowed.
“I can learn.”
A woman beneath the general store awning began to cry.
Clara did not.
“If somebody doesn’t want all of us,” she whispered, “then please let me stay with the baby.”
She looked across the crowd.
“You can have my brothers. Just don’t separate them.”
For a long moment, Silver Creek said nothing.
The silence was not mercy.
It was shame.
Because everyone understood what the little girl was offering.
Her childhood.
Her safety.
Whatever future she might have possessed.
All so four smaller children would not wake in strange houses calling one another’s names.
Horace Bell removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.
Then he lifted his gavel.
Rules were rules.
One child.
One household.
One signature at a time.
He opened his mouth.
SCRAPE.
A wooden chair dragged across the frozen porch of the boardinghouse.
Every face turned.
Nathaniel Boone stood beneath the awning.
He was thirty-five, although grief had carved enough lines into his face to make him appear older.
Tall.
Broad-shouldered.
Black coat.
Black hat.
A man built by hard country and hardened further by loss.
Everybody knew Nathaniel Boone.
His ranch lay twelve miles outside town where the foothills rose toward the mountains. He raised cattle, broke his own horses, paid his bills in cash, and rarely remained in Silver Creek longer than necessary.
His wife had died six years earlier.
Afterward, Nathaniel had become the sort of man people spoke about instead of speaking to.
Some said grief had ruined him.
Others said he preferred animals because animals never asked why he no longer smiled.
Nathaniel stepped from the porch.
Snow cracked beneath his boots.
He crossed the square.
He never looked at the crowd.
He looked only at Clara.
The little girl who was ready to give herself away to save her brothers.
Nathaniel stopped beside the wagon.
“What does it cost?”
Horace Bell blinked.
“For which child?”
Nathaniel opened his coat and removed a leather purse.
His eyes never left Clara.
“All five.”
The sound that moved through the square was almost a gasp.
Clara stopped shivering.
For one impossible second, she simply stared.
Bell frowned.
“Mr. Boone, you understand there are five of them?”
“I can count.”
“The infant may require a physician.”
“Then I’ll pay one.”
“The boys—”
“Will eat what I eat.”
“And the girl?”
Nathaniel finally looked directly at Clara.
Something old and broken shifted behind his eyes.
“She’ll be a child.”
