“Everything’s for sale, Miss Ren. It’s just a question of price.” He leaned forward in his saddle. “This place isn’t farmland. It isn’t timber. It’s a hole in a cliff and a cabin that’s 1 bad storm from falling down. Take the $12. Go somewhere with a future.”
I looked up at him, this man on his gray horse with his expensive coat, this man who made his living off other people’s desperation. “Mr. Reick,” I said, “the last person who told me I had no future was Mrs. Hester Vale of the Monroe Female Relief House. She said my grandfather left me a box of wind and a house built against a grave.” I gestured at the corridor, at the cave, at the bluff that rose behind it all. “This is what that box of wind looks like, and I’m not selling it to you or anyone else.”
His face went hard. “Winter’s coming, Miss Ren. Real winter. Not the gentle kind we had last year. When that cabin breaks and you’re freezing in the dark, you’ll wish you’d taken my $12.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but I’ll wish it from here, not from wherever $12 would have bought me a bed for a month.”
He turned his horse and rode away without another word. But I knew he would be back. Men like Calvin Reick always came back. They could wait. They had time and money, and people like me usually ran out of both.
The winter of 1897 was harder than the one before. The cold came earlier and stayed later. Snow piled up against the cabin walls and drifted across the corridor entrance until I had to dig my way out each morning. But the system held. The corridor kept the cabin’s air from plunging to killing temperatures. The cave kept my stored food fresh and my water from freezing. I burned wood, yes, but not much, a basket of kindling most days, enough to take the edge off and heat my cooking. Families who had laughed at Silas Ren’s rock garden were hauling wood every week just to stay alive. I was hauling it every few days, and I was staying comfortable.
