As Jesse predicted, three days elapsed before the railroad workers succeeded in bringing the train up to Truckee, and another week passed before they repaired the engine well enough for the passengers to continue on their journey west. Every morning after breakfast, Alice and Jesse strolled through the town, exploring its few shops and businesses and chatting with local personalities, before walking out into the outlying countryside. During their stay, they came to know and love the little town, its people, and its surroundings.
Sometimes, they walked down to the train still parked on the tracks in the middle of the mountains to watch the work or to collect those articles of their luggage they needed during their stay. Alice marveled at the engineers, sweating at their work and smeared from head to foot with black grease and soot. Jesse understood the mechanism of the engine well enough to discuss the repairs with the engineers, but Alice only watched in wonder, comprehending nothing of their conversation.
“And they don’t have a tailor,” Jesse remarked on the morning of their departure. “I could settle very happily here.”
“Really?” Alice replied. “Do you think you could find enough customers to make a living here? The population is mostly cattlemen and railroad workers, isn’t it? Do they have much use for a tailor?”
“Sure, they do,” Jesse told her. “In the ten days we’ve been here, five people have approached me, asking me to do some work for them. If we stayed here, I would have a constant supply of work, and I would make good money at it, too.”
“What work did they want done?” Alice asked.
“Some wanted clothes made,” Jesse related. “Others wanted their existing clothes repaired or refitted. There’s nowhere else for them to get their clothes made for more than a hundred miles in any direction. Didn’t you notice how filthy their overalls get, working as hard as they do? They’re awfully hard on clothes out here, even when they’re made of the heaviest duck canvas. When you throw in all the laundering they need, they wear out faster than a suit.”
“I didn’t realize they had such trouble getting clothes made,” Alice considered. “There’s so much to learn here.”
“Those with wives who are handy with a needle are the lucky ones,” Jesse told her, “but they have a serious shortage of women out here, and everyone needs clothes. I admit it’s a little different than the suits I used to make back in Greensborough, but they pay a lot better here.”
“I still have to go to Bend to sort things out with Mr. Emerson,” Alice reasoned.
“Of course,” Jesse agreed. “But if things don’t work out there, we could come here instead. I begin to have very high hopes for us out West.”
Later that day, they left Truckee behind and chugged downhill to the ocean. After changing trains in San Francisco, they headed up the Pacific Coast toward Portland, Oregon. The wide expanse of ocean reminded Alice of her father’s words. She had traveled to the point as far away from him as she could go. At Crescent City, on the California coast, she parted with many tears and good wishes from the elderly couple she helped outside Truckee. They promised on both sides to write before the elderly couple, like all the rest of them, passed forever out of Alice’s life.
Crossing the state line into Oregon, the giant trees and sheer cliffs of the California coast brought home to Alice her proximity to her destination and the reality of the life awaiting her in Bend.
“So how will you open your own shop in Bend?” she asked Jesse. “How will you afford the rent?”
“I won’t rent,” he told her. “That would be a waste of money.”
“How will you avoid paying rent?” she inquired. “You’ll have to pay rent if you want to have your own establishment. The only way to get out of paying the rent is to hire yourself out to someone else, and you already told me you don’t want to do that.”
“No,” he repeated, “I won’t pay rent, and I won’t hire myself out. I’ll have my own place.”
“But how?” she persisted.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he returned. “I’ll buy it.”
“With what?” she shot back. “Good will?”
“No, with money,” he stated.
“What money?” she insisted. “You haven’t got any money.”
“I have enough to buy my own place,” he asserted.
The dawn of illumination spread across her face, but still she couldn’t believe it. “What are you saying?”
Jesse sighed wearily. “Will you listen to me, please? I don’t want to have to keep repeating myself. I have money. How do you think I keep paying for our meals and our hotel rooms?”
“But where did this money come from?” she pressed him. “Surely you haven’t saved it all from you wages at Mr. Leary’s.”
“I saved some of it from Mr. Leary’s,” he conceded. “But the majority of it was left to me by my father.”
“Your father?” Alice repeated. “I didn’t think….”
“I know what you didn’t think,” Jesse retorted. “Since no one knew my father, and no one knows any differently, everyone assumes that my mother gave birth to me out of wedlock.”
Alice tripped over her words. “I just meant…”
Jesse cut her off with a definitive gesture of his hand. “You don’t have to explain. I already know. The truth is that I was not born out of wedlock. Quite the opposite. My parents were married, and after my mother became pregnant with me, my father was killed in an accident. He was run over by a carriage as he was crossing the road. The driver was drunk, and my father didn’t check to make sure the street was empty before he crossed.”
“That’s terrible!” Alice cried.
“It was terrible for my mother,” Jesse remarked. “She had to take in boarders to keep herself fed. Only a few people knew her well enough to know she was married before she became pregnant. Everyone else just jumped to the most convenient conclusion. Many people shunned her, and some of her most respectable potential boarders wouldn’t come near her house because of her soiled reputation.”
“I’m so sorry!” Alice moaned. “I’m sorry I jumped to that conclusion, too. That was unfair of me.”
“At least you were my friend, in spite of it,” Jesse continued. “Most of the children in our neighborhood were forbidden by their parents to associate with me.”
“My father never gave it much thought,” Alice recalled. “He saw me playing with you, and he never interfered. But I’m pretty sure he thought the same thing about you and your mother.”
“Everyone did,” Jesse maintained. “They never let me forget it. The school master even gave me a caning because of it.”
“How could he?” Alice gasped.
“Simple,” Jesse snapped. “He said I was born bad, and that I would always be bad, and that I would never come to any good, and that it was his duty to chastise me so that I would understand my place in the world. You know—all that nonsense. It happened all the time. At least twice a week, anyway, all the time I was in school. That’s why I was so happy to get into an apprenticeship with Mr. Leary. He didn’t care, as long as I did my work.”
“But didn’t you tell the school master that it wasn’t true?” Alice cried.
“I told him the first time it happened,” Jesse related, “But, by the time I met you, I stopped trying to convince people it wasn’t true. People believe what they want to believe. If they want to know the truth, they find it out for themselves. You can’t tell someone something they don’t want to hear. But getting back to the subject of my father, I was telling you that he left me some money when he died. He left me enough to travel out here to Bend, Oregon, and set myself up as a tailor in my own shop.”
“Are you sure it’s enough?” Alice pried. “I wouldn’t want you to overextend yourself so early on in your career.”
“Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “It’s enough. It’s more than enough. It’s enough for me to buy a house in the middle of town and to set up the tailor’s shop in the front room. Almost every town in the country has buildings in the middle of them with a shop in the front and a house either behind or above them. It’s the perfect situation for a tailor.”
“But it will take some time before you’re earning enough to support yourself,” Alice observed.
“I have enough to support us,” Jesse asserted.
“Us?” Alice repeated.
“Yes, us,” Jesse declared. “When we get to Bend, we’ll get married.”
Alice snickered at him. “We will?”
“Yes, we will,” he stated. “I’ve thought the whole thing out. Once we’ve gotten rid of Arthur Emerson, we’ll get married, we’ll find a house, and we’ll set up shop. What could be simpler?”
Alice gaped at him. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”
Jesse cocked an eyebrow. “What do you think I’m doing here, Alice? Do you think I came out here from Bend for the scenery? I came out here to be with you, and to prevent you from marrying Arthur Emerson, and to marry you myself. I’m not going to let you go, now that I’m so close to winning you for myself.”
Alice blinked in wonderment. “I just never really let myself believe it before. I didn’t know how serious you were.”
“I’m deadly serious,” Jesse replied. “I should have told you a long time ago that I wanted to marry you. Then again, I didn’t know I had the money to support you.”
“You didn’t know?” She started in surprise at this new revelation.
“No, I didn’t know I had money,” he told her. “I told my mother I had about fifty dollars saved up from my wages at Mr. Leary’s, and that I intended to travel with you out to Bend. I told her I intended to settle there and open my own tailor’s shop.”
“Was she angry?” Alice murmured.
“Not at all,” Jesse countered. “She knew a long time ago that I loved you and wanted to marry you. That’s when she told me about the money.”
“I’m surprised she told you at all,” Alice remarked. “I would have thought she would want you to stay in Greensborough.”
“She never expected you to leave the way you did,” Jesse revealed. “Like me, she thought we had all the time in the world. I think she was waiting for me to finish my apprenticeship. If we knew you were considering marriage as a way to help your dad, she would have told me so I could propose to you myself.”
“I wish you had,” Alice mused.
“You wouldn’t change your mind,” Jesse pointed out. “You said yourself, you didn’t feel that way about me. It took this trip, with all its twists and turns, to make you realize you couldn’t do any better than me.”
She tucked herself into the fold of his arm. “I can’t do any better than you. I’m glad I realize that now.”
“Now,” he concluded, “we’ll settle in Bend, and I’ll be the local tailor.”
“And I’ll be your seamstress,” Alice put in. “I’ll do the sewing for ladies and children, and you could tailor for men. We’ll have more customers that way.”
Jesse pressed her hand. “I hoped you’d see it that way. So you’ll come with me, then?”
She beamed brightly. “Yes. I’ll come with you.” Then another thought crossed her mind. “That is, if Mr. Emerson lets me go.”
“Why wouldn’t he?” Jesse asked. “He won’t want to keep you when he hears that you love me.”
“But he’s paid all this money to bring me out here,” Alice pointed out. “He might want compensation for that, at least. He might want compensation for any other expenses he’s laid out for this marriage, when he finds out it isn’t going to happen. He might be really angry with me.”
Jesse shook his head. “If he wants compensation, I’ll pay him compensation.”
“You can’t keep paying for everything,” Alice objected.
“Why not?” Jesse retorted. “It’s no different than if I was your husband already, and we were traveling out to Bend, Oregon, with the intention of starting a new life together. The only difference is that we would have shared a hotel room, instead of putting you in a separate room.”
“I’m sorry you had to go to all that extra expense,” she apologized. “I should have realized earlier that I wanted to marry you.”
Jesse dismissed the notion. “I’m glad you had the chance to think about it and come around to making the decision on your own terms. It works better that way. Now we just have to get the business with Mr. Emerson out of the way. After that, we can get on with the rest of our lives.”