They Said No Woman Would Wed the Scarred Blacksmith — Then His Mail-Order Bride Arrived
Chapter 6
He stopped two feet from Jeb Stone.
The iron tongs in his right hand sparked once, faintly, against a nail in the floor.
Jeb’s bravado evaporated. He took a step backward and found the cracker barrel behind him. Clara Jenkins pressed herself flat against the counter with both hands over her mouth.
Gideon looked at Jeb Stone for a long, quiet moment.
You will apologize to my wife, he said.
His voice was barely above a murmur. It vibrated the dust motes in the air.
Now, Mercer, Jeb said, his voice finding an ingratiating quality it hadn’t had before. I was just making a little—
Faster than a man his size had any right to move, Gideon’s left hand shot out and grabbed a fistful of Jeb’s wool shirt, hoisting him onto his tiptoes. With his right hand, he brought the iron tongs down onto the thick rim of the cracker barrel. The heavy wood splintered with a sharp crack — a solid two-inch stave snapping like a dry twig.
Her name, Gideon said, very quietly, is Mrs. Mercer.
He said nothing else. He didn’t need to. His ruined eye was fixed on Jeb with an absolute, unblinking steadiness that made the silence in the room seem to tighten.
I’m sorry, Jeb gasped. I’m sorry, Mrs. Mercer. I meant no disrespect.
Gideon released him. The ranch hand folded to the floor and stayed there.
Gideon turned. The fury drained from his face between one breath and the next, replaced by something quiet and careful. He offered Josie his arm — the massive, burn-scarred arm, the one the town recoiled from — with the same natural ease as a man offering shelter from rain.
Did you get your flour, Josie?
Josie looked at the storekeeper, who had been frozen at his counter since the door came open. He moved immediately to fill the order. She looked at the shelves, adding sugar and salt to her requirements with a composure she did not entirely feel, and when it was done she placed her hand on Gideon’s arm.
I believe I shall buy my supplies in Denver from now on, she said. The air in here has gone foul.
They walked out into the Colorado sunlight.
Behind them, nobody said a word.
Winter descended on Oak Haven in the first week of November, and inside the blacksmith’s cabin a different weather entirely was developing.
Josie took over the domestic work the way she took over everything she was given charge of — completely, without ceremony, and with a competence that came from years of running a household on a shrinking budget. She cooked hearty things: venison stew thick with root vegetables, buttermilk biscuits that came out of the cast-iron Dutch oven the color of good leather, honey-glazed ham from the side of pork she had traded a mended quilt for with a neighbor’s wife who’d noticed the quality of Josie’s stitchwork.
Gideon, who had been eating hard tack and scorched beans for three years, began to fill out. The hollows in his cheeks disappeared. He slept better. He began to come in from the forge at a reasonable hour instead of working until midnight to avoid the silence of the cabin.
But it was the ledger that changed things.
Josie found it on a shelf behind the bedroom door — a battered account book in which Gideon had been keeping rough track of his jobs and what he’d been paid for them. She sat down with it one Sunday afternoon and worked through the columns in the systematic way her father had taught her before his ruin, and by evening she had identified a pattern so consistent it could only be deliberate.
Gideon. She came to the forge door, the ledger open in her arms, and he looked up from the anvil. Mayor Miller owes you thirty dollars for the carriage repair. You charged him ten.
Gideon straightened. He had a piece of hot iron in his tongs and he rotated it once before answering. I ain’t much for arguing numbers, Josie. Folks pay what they can.