A House United Book 1: The Hardest Goodbye

Chapter Four

Adam's final semester at Harvard flew by, punctuated by several "last nights out" with his friends that typically ended with at least one young man, including Adam, being horribly sick. Most of his friends were headed to jobs in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, and they teased him good-naturedly about returning to Nevada to build the grandest barn the country had ever seen. But Adam suspected more than one of his pals secretly wished he, too, was heading west.

In April, he received a letter from Pa saying that Little Joe was recovering from the measles and wouldn't be coming to Adam's graduation the following month. Adam was disappointed he would have to wait longer to be reunited with his youngest brother, but he was glad he wasn't the one who had had to tell Little Joe he was staying behind. The fit that boy must have pitched probably shook the entire Utah Territory. Regardless, he felt bad for Little Joe and resolved to take him on a grand adventure someday.

Four days before graduation, Benjamin and Hoss Cartwright's steamship arrived in New York City, where Jacob, Hannah, and Josie met them, just like they had done for Adam nearly three years prior. Jacob and Ben hadn't seen each other since before Adam's birth twenty years ago, and neither man could stanch their tears.

"Jacob," Ben said huskily, "thank you. Thank you for looking after for my boy."

"Don't mention it." Jacob's voice wavered too. "You would have done the same for Josephine."

At the mention of his niece, Ben glanced around for the girl. When he spotted her, his breath caught, much as Adam's had the first time he met Josie. As Ben greeted his niece for the first time, Josie took a handkerchief from her dress pocket and dried his face.

"You look so much like your Aunt Elizabeth," Ben said softly.

"That is what I have been told, sir," Josie sweetly chirped. "People mistake Adam and me for brother and sister all the time." This fact clearly pleased the little girl, and it made her uncle smile. He was glad Adam had found someone to belong to and who so clearly belonged to him.

Then Josie spotted her cousin Hoss.

"Whoa!" The little girl's exclamation was so loud that several other people on the boat dock turned to look. "You're huge!"

Hoss blushed and ducked his blond head. "Reckon I am," he said, looking around at the more diminutive New Yorkers around them. A month shy of his fourteenth birthday, the boy already stood six feet and one inch tall, the same height as his twenty-year-old brother.

"Are you sure you are as young as they say you are, and you haven't been misinformed?"

Hoss furrowed his brow and tried to work out a response. Hannah shushed her daughter and reminded her to be polite.

"Sorry," Josie said to Hoss. "Adam just told me you were his little brother, that's all."

"Oh, well, I was littler than him last he saw me. Not by much, though."

"Hoss here hasn't been little a day in his life!" Ben said, slapping his boy's broad back. "Now let's go put some food in him!"

The Cartwrights departed the dock for their hotel, and the next morning the five of them set off on the train for Boston, where they received a polite if chilly greeting from Rachel Stoddard, at whose house they were staying. Rachel and Adam had reached an understanding after the events of last Christmas, but she still felt no warmth toward the man who had come for her nephew. She did, however, find herself unexpectedly delighting in Hoss's presence, despite her determination to remain strictly anti-Cartwright.

Though man-sized, Hoss maintained the sunny disposition of a happy-go-lucky boy and was uncommonly kind to man and beast alike. He unwittingly endeared himself to her forever when that first evening he gently removed a splinter from the paw of Rachel's beloved white terrier. The dog had bared its teeth and snarled at anyone who had tried to render assistance, but after an hour of sitting near the dog and talking softly to it, Hoss had coaxed the animal to him and pulled out the splinter with surprising deftness for someone with hands the size of saucers.