Page 9 of The Rancher's Wedding

“I need to pick up some money somebody sent me.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. He pulled out a large book and opened to somewhere in the middle. “Name?”

“Estelle Williams.”

He skimmed the page, then turned it back and found her. He flipped the book around to face her and gave her a fountain pen.

She took the pen and touched it to the page beside her name.

“Wait,” he said. “This signature indicates you’ve received the money. I haven’t given it to you yet.”

He counted out a few bills from the register and handed them to her.

“Here you go. Now sign, please.”

She signed her name and took the money. As a woman of some wealth, she’d always had access to nice things like jewelry and fancy clothes, though she couldn’t recall ever having to handle money itself. She looked at it with some fascination: it was just paper, and yet it was going to completely change her life around.

She worried, as she walked out of the office, that she was going to be found out. Maybe her father had woken early and saw her leave, or maybe there would be someone here who recognized her or who realized Megan wasn’t really her husband.

She handed Megan the money and had her buy the two tickets while she waited by the bags. The wait was agonizing, watching Megan walk over to the ticket counter and being unable to hear what was going on. The exchange went on for a while and it was difficult to read Megan’s expression, with the angle that she faced and the moustache hiding so much of her face.

When finally the money exchanged hands and Megan walked away with the tickets, Estelle let out a sigh of relief. They were almost free.

Megan led Estelle to the train and handed the tickets to the conductor. He examined them both, then looked at the two girls with a stern face that seemed impossible to read. He glanced back and forth before looking back at the tickets.

He then punched a hole in each of them and returned them to Megan.

“You two have a lovely trip,” he said.

Estelle and Megan walked inside the train and entered their cabin. They put down their bags and closed the door, then looked at each other and smiled.

They’d made it.

***

The trip took four days, including stops, to make it to Promontory, Utah, by which point Megan had tired of her costume and switched back to her typical women’s wear. The two hired a wagon to take them to Holden Ranch, and the second they left the town and found themselves surrounded by country was a revelation.

Estelle had tears in her eyes.

“Is it everything you hoped?” Megan asked.

It was an unfair question. Estelle had seen paintings of the great American West, done with bright watercolors or pastels, but they couldn’t capture the supreme majesty of it. A painting encouraged one to focus on details, but there were just too many out here. It literally surrounded Estelle. Everywhere she looked, there was something new. It would take an expert painter a lifetime to capture even a fraction of what it was like to be in the middle of a canyon, with critters scurrying through the sand and birds soaring overhead. It was an overabundance of beauty, and Estelle took it all in as if she would never see it again.

But then she reminded herself that this was her life now. This was what she would wake up to and surround herself with. This was the new normal.

“Well,” Megan insisted. “Is it?”

How could she even answer that? Was this everything she hoped for? Yes, and so much more.

“This puts what I hoped for to shame.”

***

Michael looked at himself in the mirror, wearing the suit that had gathered dust in the attic all these years. It still fit well and looked good on him, but he didn’t have any occasion to wear it until today.

And it had looked good on him for the past hour. He realized now that he should have picked the women up from the station, both his bride and her maid of honor. By now, he would have met them, instead of having to wait for their wagon to arrive.

Of course, there was work to be done around the ranch, and it was a long ride all the way out to Promontory and back. With the relationship between him and Estelle being what it was, Michael didn’t think it would be worth it for him to make the trip.

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