A Cowboy Followed His Horse Into the Mountains—Then Discovered a Woman Everyone Thought Dead
Chapter 14
On the first warm Sunday of April, with the mud deep and the sap running, Clara Hayes asked Wyatt to take her up the pass again.
This time she rode in front of him, in the saddle, and she rode without a stick and without a word of complaint, though Wyatt could feel her teeth clench when Adrien took a jarring step. She’d earned her limp and she carried it, and she’d told him once that she’d decided the limp was her badge, the physical proof that she’d walked back from the country of the dead.
The cave was waiting for them the same as always, patient, unchanged. But Clara had brought something. A small jar of honey, and a strip of bacon wrapped in wax paper, and she placed them on the flat rock beside the sealed tin of smoked fish Wyatt had left there back in November.
“You left that for me?” she said softly.
“I left it for the mountain,” Wyatt said. “It just so happens you’re the mountain’s business.”
She laughed — a real laugh, the kind she’d lost for ninety days and had been building back ever since — and then she sat down, inside the cave, at the mouth of it, with her back against the good rock, and she looked out over her valley.
“I used to dream about this view,” she said. “While I was up here, waiting. I used to dream about the day I’d sit here with a belly full of food and nothing to be afraid of, and just watch the sun go down over the valley. I figured I’d cry when it happened. Instead, I just feel… quiet. Do you know that feeling, Wyatt? The quiet after?”
Wyatt thought about it. Thought about the quiet after Rose. The years of it. The way it had finally stopped being a hole and started being a room he could sit in.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know that feeling.”
“Good,” Clara said. “Then you don’t need me to tell you it’s not weakness. The quiet is the payment, Wyatt. It’s what you get for carrying the load.”
They rode down in the dusk, and at the timberline, Clara asked him the question she’d been saving for that day, the low word of the claim.
“If it had been anyone else’s horse,” she said. “If Adrien hadn’t gone up that mountain, what would you have done?”
“Gone home,” Wyatt said honestly. “Had a drink. Checked the mares.”
“And that would have been that.”
“And that would have been that.”
Clara leaned forward and patted Adrien’s neck, right behind the ear, in the exact spot Wyatt scratched. “Then I guess I owe my life to a horse with a better map than a man’s,” she said. “And a man with the sense to follow it.”