@confetti-cat
Rosemary
She came into town alone. A pretty young thing, so soft and pale that she might have been a pampered banker's daughter from out east, except her hair was ragged--shorn off by her ears--and her eyes were much older than the rest of her. Someone said her name was Rosemary, and she boarded with the widow, Mrs. Johnson, who needed the company while she tried to prove up on her husband's claim.
About a year and a half later, she was seen out on the prairie with a little girl beside her--same pale hair, same large eyes, but with a square chin that came from who-knew-where. An old, familiar story. No one needed to ask questions.
Until the day Marks and Tucker came into town with the stranger--a dusty man in black, nearly dead, they'd found bloody and beaten by the creek. Rosemary came out of the general store just as they carried the man into the doctor's room next door. She turned pale and rushed after them, and when they laid him on the doctor's table, she squeezed his hand and refused to let go.
The doctor told Tucker to pry her loose, but that quiet little woman had lightning in her veins. She looked that big man straight in the eye and said, "I won't leave my husband."
They thought she'd gone mad, until Mrs. Johnson came in with the little girl, and Tucker noticed that the child had a chin to match the stranger's.
So Rosemary stayed, while they washed and stitched and bandaged him, and the story came out, as if she couldn't help it. Her father was an engineer with the railroad, and her mother had kept her hidden from the railroad men, but she'd fallen for one anyway--a charmer and a gambler. When she ran away to marry him, her father tracked them down, took her back, and shot him. She'd been sent off to the lonely prairie, not knowing if her husband was alive or dead.
It wasn't until two days later, when she was crying over him, that he woke.
"Rosie?" he asked, like he was wondering if maybe he'd wound up in heaven.
She smiled and nodded and couldn't speak through her tears.
"I looked everywhere for you."
According to him, he'd survived his gunshot wound and gone in search of her, doing every kind of work short of robbing trains to keep himself fed along the way. We all guessed he must have done something less-than-savory to wind up left-for-dead like he had been, but if he had, he didn't say it. No one came forward to accuse him, and no one looked further into the matter. We like our stories to have happy endings.
As best I know, they found one.
