Free Prayers for Sale by Sandra Dallas Page B

write tomorrow, refusing her friend’s offer.
    Ila Mae did not sleep well that night. She awakened several times to remember the letter and the likeness of Mr. Comfort. As she lay in the dark, the possibility of her moving to far-off Colorado seemed remote, and she would tellMartha so. But when she awakened in the morning after a few hours’ sleep, she believed that leaving Tennessee was a wise course. Why should she stay? She had no family, and before too many years passed, she would wear herself out with the heavy farmwork. There was Sarah’s grave, but it was a place of death. It was in Ila Mae’s heart that Sarah lived. And Billy, too. Billy had told her once that if anything ever happened to her, he wouldn’t want to live where he was reminded of her every day. Remembering that, she felt that Billy was telling her it was all right to move on.
    Ila Mae thought about Colorado all that day. And the next. She didn’t reply to Martha’s letter for a week, and when she did, Ila Mae told her friend that she was willing to give Colorado Territory a try.
    She wouldn’t take Mr. Comfort’s money, however. Ila Mae was determined to pay her own way, so that she would not be beholden to anyone. She would look him over and decide for herself—and appraise the other men in the camp, as well. And if none of them suited her, she would find a way to make a living on her own. Surely there was a need for a woman who could cook and launder, sew and quilt and even make bonnets. Did women hunt for gold? Perhaps she, too, would find a gold mine. Before Martha’s letter had arrived, Ila Mae believed she would spend the rest of her life as a caretaker of the past. But now she saw a future, one with a husband and maybe children. Besides, a move to Colorado would be an adventure. Ila Mae had not realized until then how predictable, how ordinary her life had become.
    As soon as Martha’s response to Ila Mae’s reply arrived, asking how soon she could leave, Ila Mae sold her farm to aneighbor and made arrangements to go west with a group of gold seekers. Many in the South were heading for the gold fields to make a new start, so finding a wagon train to join was not difficult. Ila Mae agreed to travel with a man taking a sickly wife and two small boys to Colorado, sharing their wagon and victuals in exchange for cooking and tending the children. Because there was little room in the wagon, the man grumbled when Ila Mae insisted she be allowed to take more than her trunk. But she threatened to outfit her own wagon rather than leave behind her tender possessions—the Friendship quilt her friends presented to her just before she left, each one of them working a Churn Dash block and signing it, and the quilt frame and candle cupboard, both made by Billy.
    The family she traveled with left her in Denver, where Ila Mae found a freighter leaving for the Swan River. He was a large man, who needed the wagon bench for himself, but he said he would take Ila Mae along if she and her accumulations could find a place among the freight.
    Ila Mae arrived in Middle Swan in a chill rain, wrapped in the Friendship quilt and huddled on top of a mountain of provisions. The camp did not impress her. It was raw new, the log buildings thrown up like jackstraws along a mud trail, and not a one of them was painted. Neither flowers nor grass softened the houses, and there were no trees, only stumps where the pines had been cut down for firewood or building material. She wondered if flowers grew in that high, cold place, for she could not imagine living without them.
    She had never heard so much noise. Freighters yelled as they flicked their whips at burros blocking the trail, and theburros protested in their honking bray. The thud of axes and scraping of saws swept down the mountainsides, along with the clatter of waste rock as it was dumped into yellow piles that spilled out of mine openings high above town. The miners added to the frenzy, yelling instead of