A Cowboy Followed His Horse Into the Mountains—Then Discovered a Woman Everyone Thought Dead

Chapter 16

The surgery took six hours.

Wyatt sat in the waiting room with Tom, and they didn’t talk much, and Jim Dawson brought coffee and left again, and the preacher came and left, and the whole valley, it seemed, sent somebody through those double doors. Wyatt didn’t speak to any of them more than a few words. He just sat, and waited, the way he had spent a whole frozen night once, listening to a woman breathe.

The doctor came out in the evening, still in scrubs, and the look on his face was the look of a man who had seen what he’d hoped not to see.

“We saved it,” he said. “Barely. We had to do some fancy work — a bone graft, a piece of plate, half a dozen screws — but the leg stays. She’s going to need a year of hard work and a brace, and she’s going to walk with a limp to spite us all, but the leg stays.”

Tom Hayes did something that broke every man in that waiting room. He sat down, hard, on the plastic chair, put his head in his hands, and wept like a child. And when he looked up, he was grinning through the tears like a fool who had just caught the biggest fish in the river.

“She’s the toughest thing I ever knew,” Tom said.

“She kept her part of the deal,” Wyatt said. “The mountain let her live. She let the leg live.”

“Where you going?” Tom asked, as Wyatt stood.

“Home. Got a horse to tell.”

Adrien was standing at the fence when Wyatt pulled into the yard, ears up, watching the truck like he’d been standing there all day. Wyatt walked up to the fence and pressed his forehead against the gelding’s warm, coarse neck, and stood there for a long time, letting the horse blow on his collar and shift his weight like a big, patient dog.

“She’s going to be all right, old man,” he said into the red coat. “You did your part. She’s doing hers. That’s how it works with the ones you save — they take it from there.”

Then he walked up on his porch, poured two fingers of the cheap rye he’d been nursing all winter, and sat looking at the ridge, dark against the bright bowl of stars.

He didn’t come to town the next day, or the next. But on the third day, a Saturday, he went. He had business at the feed store anyway. That’s what he told himself.

Clara wasn’t there — she was still in the hospital, and the scuttlebutt around the checkout counter said she was healing fast and fighting the nurses about her walker. But Tom was, and Tom cornered him by the seed display, and Wyatt braced himself for another envelope.

“She’s got a thing she wants to ask you,” Tom said. “When she’s out. She wouldn’t tell me what it is. Says it’s between her and the man who listened.”

“Listened to what?”

“The mountain. She said you listened to the mountain, and she’s been missing the sound of someone who listens. That’s all she’d say.”