Silas replied:
“That’s trouble.”
Clara threw towel.
Ephraim laughed.
For one brief evening, they were family without pretending history never happened.
Ephraim died when Clara was forty-one.
Pneumonia.
He had been sober nearly nine years.
Clara stayed beside him through final night.
He woke before dawn.
“Silas?”
“Outside.”
“Still doesn’t like me?”
Clara smiled.
“He likes you more than he admits.”
“Same.”
Ephraim coughed.
“Clara.”
“Yes?”
“I used to think hunger made anything permissible.”
She listened.
“I was wrong.”
“I know.”
“I thought if I survived, I could fix afterward.”
His eyes filled.
“Some things don’t fix.”
Clara squeezed his hand.
“No.”
“But people can.”
He looked.
“Can they?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes.”
Ephraim breathed out.
“That enough.”
He died an hour later.
Clara mourned.
Deeply.
Silas never told her she shouldn’t.
That was another reason she loved him.
He did not force her father into one category because it would make Clara’s emotions easier.
He let her grieve the man who hurt her and the man who changed.
Those could be same man.
At funeral, Harlan Pike handed Clara an old ledger page.
The debt.
Forty dollars and eleven cents.
Below, decades-old notation:
PAID IN FULL.
S. ROURKE.
Clara stared.
Then tore paper once.
Harlan’s eyebrows rose.
She tore again.
Fed pieces into church stove.
Harlan said:
“That was account record.”
“No.”
“It was price everyone remembered.”
She watched flames take.
“No more.”
Silas stood beside.
He did not object.
The next major turning point came in 1903.
By then Wyoming had been a state for more than a decade.
Rail lines were expanding.
Towns that once depended on wagons now heard locomotive whistles.
Harlan’s Crossing had grown into a real settlement.
A hotel.
A school.
A bank.
Telegraph office.
A physician who charged too much but knew what he was doing.
The road through the pass improved.
The old emergency shelter became less necessary for freight drivers but more useful for homesteaders and hunters.
Then Northern Continental Rail approached the Rourke land.
Not to cross.
To take water.
Steam locomotives consumed enormous quantities, and a proposed water station near lower pass needed reliable source.
The company’s first survey targeted Miller Spring.
Clara stood over map in her kitchen.
Silas sat opposite.
A railroad agent named Mr. Barlow spoke as though outcome settled.
“Company offers twenty-two hundred dollars for permanent water easement.”
Clara stared.
“No.”
Barlow smiled.
“Mrs. Rourke, perhaps you don’t understand scale.”
“I understand pipe.”
“It would divert limited amount.”
“How much?”
He consulted papers.
“Up to forty thousand gallons daily during peak operations.”
Silas looked up sharply.
Clara asked:
“How much spring produces?”
Barlow hesitated.
“Survey estimated sixty to seventy thousand depending season.”
“So more than half.”
“Peak only.”
“No.”
Barlow turned to Silas.
“Mr. Rourke?”
Silas took coffee.
“Ask her.”
“I am.”