I had planned for this chapter to be about Gideon and Alice adopting their son, but then this idea came to me instead. I tried to provide a little backstory for the brothers and why they seemed to have a bad reputation in town even before they'd done anything to deserve it. As always, I hope you'll enjoy! :)

"Never did like them Pontipees. Now I know why."

Adam had worried that Hannah might be put out by no longer being the oldest among her cousins, for Helen was a little older than her, but far from it. Hannah had no girl cousin near her age until Helen arrived, and the two were best friends almost from the minute they met. They had their own rooms at the main house, but they were forever climbing into each other's beds to whisper and giggle after they were supposed to be asleep.

One evening, after Alice returned to her and Gideon's bedroom after chiding the girls to go to sleep, she said, "I been thinkin' we should just save those two the trouble and put 'em in one room." She sat down in the willow-bough rocking chair that Gideon had made her for their fifth wedding anniversary and picked up her sewing. It was a dress that Helen and Hannah had just outgrown – they were always sharing clothes, too – and she was hemming it to fit Mary, Frank and Sarah's oldest girl. The Pontipee women were all experts at altering hand-me-downs.

"That way," Alice went on, smiling, "when we have a boy, we can put him in Helen's old room." It was April, and next month would make one year since Helen had joined them. Alice and Gideon loved her as dearly as if she were their flesh-and-blood daughter, and they'd been talking about taking in another orphan – a little boy, this time.

"Be nice if we could find a boy 'bout Adlai's age," Gideon said, smiling too. "Then they could grow up together just like brothers."

"You wanna go back to the orphan train at that depot in Eugene?"

But Gideon didn't answer right away. He was standing at the window, leaning against the sill and smoking his tobacco pipe. "Actually," he said in a quiet, thoughtful voice, "I was thinkin' 'bout goin' to Bend."

"Bend?" Alice repeated, surprised. She had heard of Bend – it was about as far as Eugene, but in the opposite direction – but none of the family had ever traveled there. "Why Bend?"

"Well, that's the nearest orphanage to here, the boys' home in Bend."

This seemed like an odd piece of information for Gideon to have. Alice looked at him over her sewing and titled her head. "Is it? How come you know that?"

Gideon took a deep breath, and Alice knew that it was hard for him to say when he answered, "'Cause I almost went there."

Gideon told her the story slowly. Alice knew that the Pontipee brothers had been orphaned suddenly when they were still boys, but she hadn't known that one day, not long after their parents' were buried, a group of townspeople visited their homestead and had a long talk with Adam and Benjamin about their younger brothers' welfare. They said they were too young to take care of their brothers and keep up the farm on their own. They said the sensible thing to do was split them up. They said Gideon, the youngest, would have to go to the nearest orphanage, a boys' home in Bend, but some others could stay with families in town, to live and work for them.

"They had it all figgered out between 'em," Gideon said. There was a far-away look on his face as he stared through the window at the moonlight on the snow outside. Alice was listening with her blue eyes wide and her sewing forgotten in her lap. "The Jebsons was gonna take Ephraim, and some other family – the Browns, I think – was gonna take Frank. They told Adam and Ben they was doin' 'em a right favor, takin' us off their hands."

Adam had handled it all very well for a teenager. He listened calmly, then thanked the townsfolk for their offer, but said no, he and his brothers were all going to stay together on their homestead, because that's what their ma and pa had wanted. The townsfolk balked and called him crazy. They said that seven boys would never be able to keep a farm going well enough to feed themselves. That made Benjamin lose his temper and start shouting, and the whole scene ended, Gideon said, with Benjamin chasing the townsfolk off their land with his father's gun, yelling, "Think we're crazy, do ya? Well, I'll show ya crazy!" while Caleb and Daniel whooped and cheered him on.

Alice's mouth was hanging open by the time Gideon reached the end of the story. She liked to let her blonde hair down in the evenings, and with her hair loose and such surprise on her face, she looked younger, almost like a little girl again. Gideon could tell how much it had effected her, hearing about this, which was one reason why he hadn't shared it with her before.

Alice could only stare for a moment, then she jumped up to relight the oil lamp, which had almost burned out while Gideon talked. "You never me told me any of this," she said softly, as she twisted the knob to raise the wick. She felt a sudden new surge of respect for her oldest brother-in-law. Alice had disliked Adam at first – mostly because the kidnapping had been his idea – but now, as she thought about how hard it must have been for him to take care of six younger brothers and keep them together when the townsfolk wanted to tear them apart, all when he was still a boy himself, Alice could've walked right up to him and kissed him.

"It were a long time ago," Gideon shrugged, and he ran one hand through his russet hair, "but I always reckoned that's why nobody in town never used to like us, even before... well, you know, even before the kidnappin'. They just thought we was too wild, all seven of us growin' up way out here with no ma or pa, no neighbors 'cept the cattle."

"Well, it still weren't fair on you, not givin' you a chance," Alice said defensively. She picked up her sewing again and rethreaded her needle, but after a moment, she set it back down. "I can't believe you never told me this before," she said, shaking her head at her husband.

Gideon's face flushed the same color as his hair. "Well, I don't really remember it myself," he said, embarrassed. "I just know what my brothers told me." He explained that he had been downstairs with his brothers when the townsfolk had arrived, but when he'd heard those words about the boys' home in Bend where they wanted to send him, he'd run upstairs and found the trunk that held his mother's clothes, which still smelled like her. He was little enough to climb inside, so he did, too upset to notice that the key was inside it with him. Later, his brothers heard him crying inside the locked trunk, and Adam had to get an axe from the barn and cut through the lock to get him out.

Gideon fell silent for a moment, remembering. He was a bawling mess when his brothers finally pulled him out of the trunk, and he'd clung to Adam's neck like his life depended on it and begged him to not to send him away to Bend. "Aw, come to your senses, Giddy," Adam had said, patting his back, "you know we'd never do any fool thing like that."

Outside the window, a light came on in Frank and Sarah's cabin across the pasture, distracting Gideon back to the present. He looked closer and saw Sarah cross the window; their children should all be asleep by now, but probably their new baby was crying. Gideon's chest swelled with a sudden rush of pride; it was hard work, but he and his brothers had kept their farm going. They hadn't been split up or parceled out to families in town, and now, years later, they were all still here, still together, raising their own families. Gideon could barely remember his ma and pa, but he thought they would be proud.

"Well, we can go to Bend once the mountain passes are open again," Alice said. Echo Pass, between their homestead and the town, had kept clear every year since that winter of the kidnapping and the avalanche long ago, but they knew that other passes between there and Bend were probably closed up. "Meantime I can ask my pa to write to the pastor in Bend and get their address."

Alice picked up her sewing again and began to hum as she worked by the oil lamp's light. The tune was an old Irish folk-song that Helen had taught them – "Can ye sew cushions, or can ye sew sheets?" Helen had brought so much into their family, and Gideon felt sure that this coming year would be full of more surprises, for they would have not just a daughter, but a son, too. Yes, his parents would certainly be proud.