Life After Wife (Three Magic Words Trilogy, #3)(49)

Elijah crooked his arm and she stood up, slipped hers in it, and they continued on to the blacksmith shop. Another rough wood building with four posts, barely scraped clean of bark, holding up the slanted porch roof. In her mind it was busy and hot, with a raging fire going in a pit so the blacksmith could soften the metals before he beat them into shape. She could hear the ting of the ball-peen hammer and feel the heat finding its way out into the yard.

“What are you thinking about?” Elijah asked.

“I’m picturing it all in my mind. Would you have wanted to ride with Pat Garrett and Wyatt Earp?” she asked.

“What makes you think I would have been on that side of the law?” He chuckled.

She slapped his arm softly. “Elijah Jones, even in another era, you would have been the cowboy in the white hat.”

He smiled. “Why thank you, Miz Sophie. I appreciate your confidence. But I might have been the blacksmith or the general store owner.”

“Nope. You might have been the commander of the fort if you hadn’t been a lawman.”

“You got a higher opinion of me today than you did a month ago at the funeral,” he said.

“Today, darlin’, you’ve got a higher opinion of me, too. Would you have offered to let me buy half those ranches a month ago? I don’t think so. You would have bought them and tried to wear me down to sell my half of the Double Bar M.”

They walked back to the two-story building that now housed the Fort Griffin Lodge Hall. The historical marker outside said that it was chartered in 1878. Less than ten years later, the US Army vacated Fort Griffin and the Texas Central Railway bypassed the town. The lodge moved to Throckmorton, but school was held in the building until 1937.

“So this was your building, Miz Sophie,” Elijah said.

“Yes, we had a potbellied stove over there and long lines of desks with a center aisle so I could walk up and down to check my students’ work. I had the soldiers’ kids, the town kids, and even the children who were born to the ladies who worked for Big Nose Kate. They were a diverse group, but kids are kids. They learned, they grew up, and they left the school,” she said.

“You ever want to be a school teacher?” Elijah asked.

She shook her head. “But standing here and thinking about the primitive methods they used, I think I might have liked it back then.”

When they were back outside, they found another historical marker. It mentioned a newspaper called the Fort Griffin Echo. Sophie ran her hand over the raised lettering and asked, “If you weren’t a commander or a lawman, maybe you’d have been a newspaper man.”

He laughed. “Not me. I’m too controversial for that. I’d make someone mad enough to hang me in every single edition.”

“That’s the truth,” she agreed.

“So have we worked off our ice cream? You ready for a midafternoon late lunch or early supper?” he asked.

“Where you thinkin’ about?”

“The Eagle’s Nest in Albany. Church crew will be finished and gone. We’d probably have the place to ourselves, and they make a pretty good chicken fried steak,” he said.

Her stomach growled loudly as they headed up the hill toward the visitor’s center.

“Guess I got my answer.” He laughed.

“Chicken fried steak does sound good.”

Elijah stopped and looked down into her eyes. “Why aren’t you at the girls’ powwow today?”

“It’s not set in stone that we get together every single Sunday afternoon, but we do try. Today Kate has to be off at a family gathering with Hart, and Theron’s parents came to visit from Shamrock, so Fancy Lynn is busy with family, too.”

“What about next Sunday when we go fishing?”

“It’s on the way. I’ll spend half an hour with them and meet you at the lake,” she said.

“How about if I holler at Theron and we do something for an hour, and that way we can still ride the cycle together?”

“Sounds like a plan.” She picked up the helmet, crammed it down on her head, and mounted the back seat of the big bike. When Elijah crawled on she wrapped her arms around him and was amazed anew at the tingly feeling that danced up and down her backbone.

It only took fifteen minutes to reach the café in Albany and it was empty. They sat at a table near a window, and the waitress came right away with two tall glasses of ice water.

Elijah waved away the menus and told her they’d have two glasses of sweet tea and two of the chicken fried steak dinners. “I want ranch dressing on my salad. What about you, Sophie?”

“Honey mustard,” she said.

The waitress nodded and disappeared back into the kitchen.

“You grew up in this town. Did y’all hang out here all the time?” He looked around at the bulletin board with pictures of that year’s football team and the schedule.

“Not us. We weren’t the popular kids, Elijah. We were just barely considered middle class, and we sure don’t have any football queen tiaras in our memory boxes. We all left the area when we were fifteen. Fancy Lynn’s momma got remarried and they moved to Florida since her stepdad was a career military man and stationed there. My dad got a promotion in the oil company and we moved out to the Texas Panhandle, from there to Cushing, Oklahoma, and then to Alma, Arkansas. I went to school at the university in Fayetteville. Kate’s dad went back to the sugar plantation down in Louisiana.”