He also noticed when their father began speaking about grandchildren.
One evening in the autumn of 1872, Joseph sat beside the kitchen stove while Samuel repaired a broken bridle.
“Your mother would have liked to see you married,” he said.
Samuel glanced up.
“She liked seeing everyone married. Even the neighbors she disliked.”
Joseph chuckled.
“Your mother wanted a house full of children.”
Samuel lowered his eyes to the bridle.
“Then she should have had more sons.”
“I did my best.”
They laughed.
Then Joseph grew serious.
“I want you to build a family, Samuel. The ranch is a fine thing, but it isn't a substitute for people who love you.”
Samuel remembered those words years later, after he believed he had been denied the possibility of following them.
At the time, he had simply shrugged.
“There’s no hurry.”
Joseph looked at him over the rim of his coffee cup.
“There's never a hurry until there is.”
Three months later, Samuel met a woman named Eleanor Price.
She was twenty-six, the daughter of a shopkeeper in Helena, with dark blond hair, quick laughter, and a way of listening that made Samuel feel as though he were the only man in the room.
They met at a winter social organized to raise money for a church roof.
Samuel had attended because Joseph insisted that a man could not spend every evening counting cattle.
Eleanor had attended because her younger sister wanted to dance.
By the end of the evening, Samuel had danced with Eleanor six times.
By the end of the month, he had written her three letters.
By the end of the summer, he had begun thinking about building a house for her on the eastern side of the ranch, where the creek ran through a stand of cottonwoods.
He had never told anyone how often he imagined children running across the porch.
He thought about small boots left beside the stove, little hands learning to braid rope, and a daughter riding in front of him on his old mare while the sun rose over the mountains.
He imagined a boy with Eleanor’s eyes and his father’s stubbornness.
He imagined being a better father than Joseph had been in his hardest moments, gentler where gentleness was needed, firm where courage mattered.
He wanted those things so badly that he scarcely dared say them aloud.
Then, in October, he fell from his horse.
It happened on a narrow trail above the creek after a sudden storm turned the ground slick. His horse slipped, and Samuel was thrown against a rock shelf before tumbling down the embankment.
A ranch hand found him an hour later.