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If she had possessed the strength, she might have laughed. Or cried. Or asked whether he was mad.
Instead she stared at him through snow-crusted lashes, too stunned even to form an objection, while he carried her up the ridge toward a cabin hidden among the firs.
His name, she learned later, was Elias Boone.
The cabin sat in a clearing half swallowed by winter, built of thick spruce logs chinked tight against the weather. Smoke rolled from the chimney into a sky the color of lead. The place looked lonely, stubborn, and handmade, much like the man himself.
He pushed in through the door with Ruth still in his arms. Heat struck her first, then the smell of venison stew, pine smoke, iron, leather, and soap. It was the smell of work and survival, of a life lived without waste. Elias set her carefully into a ladder-back chair near the fire, then crouched to pull off her frozen boots.
“You ought not,” Ruth whispered, ashamed.
“Ought not leave your feet to blacken neither,” he answered.
