Adam froze, his hand extended for the money. “Diaper flannel?”
Her tears forgotten, Deb bit back a smile as she dropped the coins in his hand. “Yes, please. And probably as much as they’ve got, considering the state of most small-town general stores. If you get too much, I can sew up shirts for you men so you’ll have spares. Then I can do the washing for you.”
“You’re going to make our shirts with the same cloth you’re making diapers?” Adam looked at his hand as if she’d dropped a rattlesnake in his palm. He gave his head a violent shake as if he’d been dunked in water, whirled around, and ran out of the house.
These men certainly did like to dive into their work. Especially when it meant putting space between themselves and anything to do with a diaper.
Trace and Utah handed over their cleaned-up plates with polite words. Utah found his hat on a nail in the house and tipped it as he thanked them both.
It was so flattering, so touching, Deb could only nod.
“We’d best get to chopping wood so these women have a snug, warm place for the winter.” Trace followed Utah out. Wolf looked back and forth between Maddie Sue and Trace and appeared just plain torn about what to do, but finally he went along with his master.
It soothed her soul to be told “thank you” by a man, possibly for the first time in her life.
No, goodness gracious, she’d be honored to cook for these fine gentlemen for the winter. Trace saved them. And these men gave up their cabin for them and now planned to build, so they all could have a warmer home.
Whatever they needed—mending, washing, cooking, cleaning—she’d do. The men would never lack for thanks, either.
Hooves pounded away. Adam on his way.
Deb washed up two plates. She and Gwen had their breakfast and planned the next meal while they ate this one.
The rhythmic ring of hewing axes set their work to a kind of rough music.
CHAPTER
11
Adam took a packhorse. Trace had heard Deb ask for flannel, but that didn’t require a spare horse. And taking the packhorse slowed him down because no critter on this property was as fast as Adam’s stallion. But without the load of a rider it could keep up. Because of the early morning wake-up, thanks to Maddie Sue’s hollering, it was only just past sunup. Trace hoped Adam could get back not too far past midday.
Trace worried about him because the sky was overcast. There’d been heavy snow all day up in the peaks. Only a little fell down here on lower ground, but more would come, and soon.
He hated any man being on the trail this late in the season, and Trace’s turn was coming. He had some hunting to do.
“We’re going to be lucky to get a roof over the women’s heads,” Trace said to Utah as they passed each other. They’d chopped down trees all morning, and now Trace and Utah used the horses to drag logs up to the building site. They had enough to start the walls, and Utah wanted to get the framing done.
“Why here?” Trace asked. He knew nothing about building except some real basic things he’d learned as a youngster working with his pa.
His cabin stood as proof of that.
Utah started in talking about the direction of the wind in winter and how the rain came in during spring storms. He seemed stuck on morning sunlight as opposed to afternoon and pointed to trees that lost their leaves and compared them to pines that didn’t—as if that meant something important.
A spring bubbled out of a rock in one spot and created a little stream. He said a man who fights water always loses.
Trace heard every word, though it didn’t make a lot of sense. That’s why he’d wanted to wait until spring, so he could learn all this.
And then they started building and he did learn. He found out that if a man chinked out the corner of a log a hundred times, he started to get good at it. And Utah wouldn’t do it for him and wouldn’t put up with a poorly done corner. It wasn’t as if Utah was sitting around idle; he was working on the sides of the trees, getting rid of knots and branches, picking out logs straight as a lance, rejecting bent and warped trees. He said they’d be used for something else.
Trace saw the sun high in the sky and wondered where the morning had gone. But sure enough, his stomach told him it was mealtime and beyond.
Deb wanted neither to interrupt the commotion outside nor to run afoul of it. Add in the image of a tree falling on one of the children and she was firm in her course that all of them should stay to the house as much as possible.
The only times they dared go outside were for a few minutes to the privy, and a quick run Deb made to Trace’s root cellar.
“He’s got so much food, Gwen.” Deb heard the hungry excitement in her voice.
Gwen laughed. “Better than on the wagon train?”
“Well, considering we’ve had little but venison roasted in strips over a fire and hard biscuits for months, yes, better than the wagon train. By about a thousand miles.”
She lifted up one arm to present a ham.
Gwen’s gasp of excitement made Deb take her turn laughing. “I see you’re a bit tired of tough deer meat too, sister.”
“And you’ve got potatoes. When is the last time we ate a vegetable?” Gwen moved to the cupboard under the sink and swung open a door. “There is plenty of flour down here, and I added to the sourdough starter.”
“I found two bushels of apples, Gwen. We’ve got plenty of time to make pie.”
Gwen was the better baker of the two of them, though Deb wouldn’t be ashamed of what she could produce.
“I’ll make two of them,” Gwen
