I wasn't a rich man.
I had a little money from the sale of my last cattle partnership, a modest claim to the land surrounding the cabin, and enough supplies to survive the winter if I used them carefully.
But I'd grown tired of people.
Tired of explaining myself.
Tired of watching decent men become cruel whenever money or pride entered a conversation.
Most of all, I'd grown tired of remembering a woman named Eliza.
For twenty years, I had avoided speaking her name.
Not because I'd forgotten her.
Because I hadn't.
I'd loved Eliza Walker with a kind of foolish certainty that only young men understand. We married when I was thirty-two and she was twenty-seven, in a little frontier church where the roof leaked and the preacher was more interested in getting back to supper than delivering a proper sermon.
She wore a pale blue dress that day.
Her hair was dark.
Her smile was bright enough to make me forget every hardship I'd endured getting to that little settlement.
For four years we built a life together.
Then, in 1856, something happened along a mountain freight road that tore that life apart.
The settlement burned.
Several families disappeared.
And Eliza never came home.
For years I believed the official explanation that she'd died during a fire near a flooded river crossing. I searched until my money was gone and my horse nearly died beneath me, but the men who claimed to have seen her last offered contradictory stories.
Some said she reached the river.
Others said she rode south with a family from the mining camp.
One man claimed she had abandoned me willingly.
I nearly killed him for saying it.
Eventually, I stopped searching.
But I never stopped wondering.
That uncertainty followed me across every trail and every empty mile until I decided there was no point remaining among people who could remind me of what I'd lost.
So I settled in the mountains.
I built a stable.
Repaired the cabin.
Stacked enough firewood to survive the winter.
And convinced myself solitude was the same thing as contentment.
Then, on the morning of January nineteenth, I heard a horse screaming beyond the timber.
The storm had begun before dawn.