She stared at him.
"What?"
He swallowed.
"Alder Pass. Twelve winters ago."
The cookhouse suddenly felt very quiet.
Loretta remembered snow.
A broken wagon.
A mountain storm so terrible that the world seemed to disappear beyond the lantern light.
And a stranger lying near a frozen trail, barely breathing.
She looked at the man seated before her.
Then at his eyes.
Her heart began pounding.
"Who are you?"
The stranger slowly reached beneath the collar of his weathered shirt.
He withdrew a small piece of faded blue ribbon.
Its edges were worn.
A knot remained tied near one end.
Loretta stared.
She knew that ribbon.
She had once tied it around the makeshift bandage of a dying traveler, twelve winters earlier, because she'd run out of clean cloth and needed something to hold the dressing in place.
She remembered his fever.
His bloodless face.
And the way he'd whispered that he couldn't feel his legs.
She had stayed beside him through an entire night, tending the fire and refusing to let him fall asleep when his breathing became dangerously shallow.
Then, before dawn, she'd placed the ribbon in his hand and told him to hold onto it until help arrived.
She had never learned what happened to him afterward.
Now the same ribbon lay in the stranger's palm.
Loretta's eyes filled.
"That can't be."
He looked at her.
His voice was thick with emotion.
"You saved my life twelve winters ago."
She covered her mouth.
The stranger swallowed.
"I've searched for you ever since."
Loretta stared at him.
Then she whispered, "You came all this way... just for me?"
The enormous mountain man looked toward her with an expression so gentle that the tears she'd been holding back finally spilled down her cheeks.
"Yes, ma'am."
He looked at the ribbon.
Then back at her.
"Every mile."
Loretta sat down heavily on the reinforced kitchen stool.
Her knees would no longer hold her.
For a moment, she couldn't look away from the ribbon lying across the stranger's broad palm. Its blue color had faded almost to gray, and the cloth had been repaired with several tiny stitches. She remembered making those stitches herself.
Twelve years had passed since that winter.
She had been twenty-three then, working at a remote mountain rest station with her widowed aunt. The building stood beside Alder Pass, where freight drivers, prospectors, and travelers stopped to buy supplies before attempting the dangerous trail across the mountains. Loretta had spent most of her days cooking, washing blankets, tending fires, and helping travelers who arrived injured or half-frozen.