At night, the train stopped in a bustling city she had never seen before—Philadelphia—where she took a room at a boardinghouse for the few hours between departure and thenext day’s southbound line. The bed was narrow, the mattress lumpy, and she lay awake listening to the unfamiliar hum of the street outside.
?
From Philadelphia, she rode another train to Baltimore, the stations smaller now, the countryside dotted with fields thick in summer green beneath the long afternoon sun.In the station cafés, she tasted foods she’d never had in Boston—cornbread warm from the griddle, ham with a sweetness she could not place. The accents around her shifted too, vowels softening, voices carrying a slower rhythm.
It was in Baltimore that she boarded the coastal steamer—a great, broad-decked vessel that smelled of tar, salt, and coal smoke. The voyage took her south along the Atlantic coast, each day warmer than the one before. She watched the shoreline pass in a hazy ribbon, gulls circling overhead, waves broken in the ship’s wake.
Nights at sea were restless, the motion of the water seeping into her bones. Once, a storm drove the passengers below deck, rain lashing the portholes and wind howling in the rigging. She thought of Thomas’s letters, of the wide skies and mild winters, and wondered if Texas storms thundered like this.
?
In New Orleans, she disembarked into a world loud and hot with life. The air was thick with scents—spices, river mud, roasting coffee beans. She’d never seen such a mingling of people: men in broad-brimmed hats and embroidered waistcoats, women with bright scarves tied over their hair, dockworkers shouting in French and English alike. She stayed only two nights in a small inn off the harbor, but the city imprinted itself on her: thewrought-iron balconies, the music drifting from open doorways, the taste of chicory coffee sipped in the morning heat.
From there, her journey turned inland.
The sun was barely rising when Violet climbed aboard a stagecoach, its wooden frame creaking beneath her boot. The coach smelt like of old leather, dust, and faint, lingering sweat from the last passengers. The coach lurched forward, wheels groaning over the hard packed dirt. With each jolt, her teeth rattled, and her spine jarred against the small frame bench. The roads were far from being smooth—they were hard from ruts carved by the rain. The driver cracked the whip and hollered at the team of six, his voice half swallowed by the dry wind.
Dust poured in from every gap, between the boards, under the doors, through the threadbare curtains. It clung to her skin, turned the air dry in her throat, and coated her tongue with grit. She could taste what lay ahead, raw and real. And yet she was still excited for the adventure that lay ahead.
?
The stagecoach was smaller and far less comfortable than the trains and steamers she’d grown accustomed to on this trip. Its wheels rattled over the rutted roads, its canvas sides flapping in the wind.
The days blurred together—long hours of jolting motion broken only by brief stops in rough little towns where she could stretch her legs and take a cup of coffee or a plate of beans. Sometimes they changed horses at lonely crossroads where only a single shack stood, the driver exchanging a few words with the hostler before they moved on.
By the second week on this road, the land itself had begun to change. Trees grew sparser, the sky wider. The air was dry enough to chap her lips, and dust crept into every seam of herclothing. She kept a handkerchief in her lap to shake over her skirts whenever they stopped, but it made little difference.
At night, she lay in stage-stop bunks, listening to the unfamiliar sounds: coyotes yipping far off, the steady hum of insects, the creak of the wind against the building.
She had been traveling for nearly three weeks since leaving Boston when the driver drew up at a settlement the locals called Badger Crossing. It was little more than a trading post, and a scatter of houses, and here she was told she was well inland from Galveston—and that Mr. McBride’s ranch lay still a long ride beyond.
The thought of the miles yet to come made her chest tighten. She had already crossed more distance than she’d ever dreamed, and still, she was not even close enough to picture his face.
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She took a room at the trading post’s upstairs lodging for the night, sitting at the narrow window to watch the sun go down. The horizon here was nothing like Boston’s—no church spires, no ship masts, only a flat line where the land met the sky, painted gold and deep rose.
Somewhere beyond that distance was Thomas McBride.
For the first time, she wondered if he pictured her at all, or if she was simply a solution to a problem she did not yet understand.
Chapter Seven: Ambushed on the Plains
The morning the stagecoach left Badger Crossing, the air already shimmered with heat. A pale haze lay across the horizon, softening the edges of the few scattered cottonwoods along the river. The stagecoach rocked and jolted as it moved, its canvas cover slapping in the warm breeze. Inside, the air was close, smelling of dust, leather, and the faint tang of sweat from her fellow passengers.
They spoke little. A man in a broad hat with a scar along his jaw kept his eyes half-closed against the glare; a young woman with a nursing infant leaned into the shade, humming under her breath. The driver’s voice floated back now and then—sharp calls to the horses, a muttered curse when the wheels hit a rut.
By midday, the road had narrowed to a dusty track. Grass taller than Violet’s waist rippled in waves on either side, and the sun pressed down so hard she felt as if her very bones were heating through. Each time they stopped to water the horses, she stepped down just to stretch her legs, but the relief of fresh air was brief. Heat shimmered off the land in wavering curtains.
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Two days passed like this, the land growing more open and the trees thinner. They camped one night at a way station little morethan a log house and corral, the driver warning that the road ahead was lonely and seldom traveled.
Violet slept fitfully, waking once to see the sky ablaze with stars, more than she had ever imagined existed, scattered so thickly they seemed to hum with light. She thought of Thomas McBride somewhere beyond this darkness, perhaps looking at the same sky.
It was late the next morning, the sun standing high, when the attack came.
The coach had just rattled over a shallow dry creek bed when the first sound reached them—hooves, fast and heavy, pounding from somewhere unseen. The driver hauled on the reins, peering over his shoulder. Violet twisted in her seat and saw them: a line of riders sweeping toward the stagecoach through the tall grass, the sunlight flashing on the long points of their lances.
