"Be okay if I set down a spell and look at this?"

"Sure thing, help yourself. Can I get ya a cup of coffee or anything?"

"No, ma’am, I’ll just…" With the paper he gestured toward the row of high-backed booths, turned and folded his lanky frame into one of them. From the corner of his eye he saw the waitress produce a compact and begin to paint her lips. He buried his face in the Whitney Register. Headlines about the war in Europe; disclosure of a secret meeting between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, who’d drafted something called the Atlantic Charter; Joe DiMaggio playing another in his long string of safe-hit games; Citizen Kane, starring Orson Welles, showing at someplace called The Gem; the announcement of a garden party coming up on Monday; an advertisement for automobile repair beside another for harness repair; the funeral announcement of someone named Idamae Dell Randolph, born 1879 in Burnt Corn, Alabama, died in the home of her daughter, Elsie Randolph Blythe on August 8, 1941. The want ads were simple enough to locate in the eight-page edition: a roving lawyer would be in town the first and third Mondays of each month and could be found in Room 6 of the Town Hall; someone had a good used daybed for sale; someone wanted a husband…

A husband?

Will’s eyes backtracked and read the whole ad, the same one she’d tacked up on the time board at the mill.

WANTED-A HUSBAND. Need healthy man of any age willing to work a spread and share the place. See E. Dinsmore, top of Rock Creek Road.

A healthy man of any age? No wonder the millhands called her crazy.

His eyes moved on: somebody had homemade rag rugs for sale; a nearby town needed a dentist and a mercantile establishment an accountant.

But nobody needed a drifter fresh out of Huntsville State Penitentiary who’d picked fruit and ridden freights and wrangled cattle and drifted half the length of this country in his day.