Kid Cole and Sister Ruth lay basking in the afterglow of having marked their one year anniversary.

"You ever wonder what would've happened if we'd met earlier in our lives?" she asked suddenly.

He took a few seconds to genuinely consider it then he said, "It's hard to say. I had a reputation for being a gun fighter by the time I was 18; it's how I got the nickname Kid, and it was too much for a kid to handle. The stress that came with it made me pick up some vices I shouldn't have. Vices I had all but dropped by the time you met me. No, you wouldn't have liked me then."

"Let's see, when you was 18, I would've been about 20. You wouldn't have liked me then either. That's when I first came out west. I thought I was going to set the whole wild land on fire for God, and like most young people, I thought I had life all figured out. Romance was the last thing on my mind. In fact, I'd made up my mind that I was going to be celibate to have the strength of ministry that Paul had."

He grinned as he thought of how they'd just celebrated their anniversary. She certainly wasn't celibate now. He took in the familiar scent of her skin, a combination of soap and fresh bread that worked together to make a heady aroma. "I bet we would've butted heads alright. We most likely met at just the right time for the both of us."

"Still, I wonder what would've happened if we'd have crossed paths back then…"

1828

Ruth ached from the top of her head down to the tips of her toes. Even her teeth hurt. Riding in a stagecoach was no picnic with its jolting up and down motion. She planned on it being quite a while before she used her backside again.

It had been a long, hard journey, but she hadn't run into some of the typical problems found on the Santa Fe Trail like robberies and Indian raids, an outright miracle. God was obviously watching out for her.

Santa Fe looked nothing like the sleepy, little mountain community she was from, but after traveling through land so flat and treeless that it made her feel exposed, the mountains were somewhat of a relief even if they weren't like the mountains of home. They were great big things with jagged, snow-covered peaks instead of the rounded, unimposing, little mountains that had nestled her safely in its hollows for the first 20 years of her life. She had to admit though that the land did have an untamed sort of beauty to it even if it didn't have the richness of good farmland.

The differences didn't stop with the landscape. The buildings were old and made mostly of adobe. The town wasn't put out in an altogether attractive layout either. It was like the buildings had been thrown together haphazardly.

It was the people though that fascinated her the most. She could hear snatches of Spanish conversation for the first time in her life. She could see a small number of American men in the numbers that were walking or riding in the street, but they were clearly men who'd not had the civilizing effect of good, Christian women in quite a while, traders mostly and men in cowboy hats with guns around their waists. There were a few brown-skinned women, and she was startled to see that 1 or 2 of them were smoking cigarettes right out there in full view although it was plain to see they were respectable in every other way.

It all served to make her realize she was in a whole other world. She had heard Santa Fe meant Holy Faith, and she hoped that there was some truth to it and that it would be easy to find some fellow believers. She could see a church in the distance, leading her to believe there had to be godly people in the community, and even if there weren't, this was why she'd come out here to help hurting souls and bodies. Even so, she couldn't help but wonder if she was out of her element here and if this was really what God intended for her as a wave of homesickness swept over her.

It was too late to question it though. She was down to next to nothing in terms of cash, so there would be no going back, at least not right away. She took a deep intake of breath, and she may have been crazy but even the air felt different here.

Eyes followed her as she started down the street. She was as unusual a sight to them as they were to her. She ignored it the best she could as she sought out the general store, figuring that the owner might be able to direct her to a decent boardinghouse.

She hadn't taken many steps before the crack of a pistol rang out. She froze in her tracks, turning to search out the source of the gunshot. A tall, young man in dark clothing stood in the street with the smoking gun in hand. Another man lay crumpled not 12 feet in front of him, his blue shirt rapidly staining from the gunshot wound he'd just received, and the worst thing was that although many had scrambled for cover, no one seemed all that surprised.

No, this definitely wasn't home.