Her husband, Thomas Carver, hadn’t died in any heroic way that would have looked good carved into a headstone. No war story. No river rescue. No dramatic last words with the sunset behind him like a painting. Thomas died the slow way, the miserable way, with fever that started in his lungs and refused to leave. He coughed through September, insisted on mending fence posts through October out of mule-headed pride, then was dead before the first real snow convinced the valley it was serious.
They’d been married two years. They had no children. What they had was a sturdy cabin Thomas built with his own hands, 160 acres of grazing land on the eastern side of the valley, and twelve head of cattle that looked like a future if you squinted hard enough.
What they also had, though Nora didn’t know it until after the funeral, was a debt.
Two days after they buried Thomas, Nora was cleaning the cabin like she could scrub grief out of corners. She found the tin box under a loose floorboard near the hearth. Inside was a bank note.
$200. Due January 1st, 1882.
Nora sat down so abruptly her knees hit the floor. The cabin smelled like smoke and wool and the faint medicinal bitterness of herbs she’d boiled for Thomas until her hands shook from exhaustion.
Two hundred dollars may as well have been two hundred moons.
She counted what she had: eleven dollars in coins, and a gold wedding band she could maybe get five dollars for if she rode all the way to Missoula and found someone cruel enough to buy it.
The next morning, she saddled Thomas’s horse, a stocky bay gelding named Ransom, and rode into town.
The Territorial Bank of Elk Falls was a narrow building that always smelled like ink and ambition. Behind the counter sat Alistair Goss, a thin man with careful hands and a mouth that looked like it had never laughed in its life.
