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

Chapter 4

It barely looked like a human hand.

The skin was blackened at the fingertips, cracked and bleeding at the knuckles, crusted with what looked like months of mud and grime and God only knew what else. It was thin, skeletal, a claw trembling violently in the frigid air, and Wyatt’s finger hovered over the trigger with the weight of a lifetime of decisions behind it.

The hand reached up blindly, the fingers brushing against Adrien’s nose.

The horse didn’t flinch. Didn’t pull back. He just stood there, a mountain of warmth and quiet muscle, letting the terrified, dying creature touch him. The trembling fingers closed around a hank of the roan’s dark mane and held on, and something in the horrible raw stillness of that moment made Wyatt’s hand drop away from the hammer.

He eased the revolver down with his thumb and slipped it back into its holster. He didn’t make a sudden move. He didn’t shout. He took one step, then another, until he was standing beside his horse, close enough to see.

“Easy now,” he said, his voice dropping an octave, slipping into the low, steady cadence he used to calm panicked livestock. “Easy. I ain’t gonna hurt you.”

He reached out and took hold of the blue tarp. It was stiff with frost, crackling as he peeled it back.

The breath left Wyatt’s lungs in a single, painful rush.

Huddled in the dirt was a woman. She was wrapped in what was left of a man’s canvas jacket, three sizes too large, stained with dried earth. Her legs were curled into her chest, wrapped in a filthy wool blanket. One of her boots was missing. Her right leg, from the knee down, was bound tightly in splints made from pine branches and torn strips of cloth, and the foot was wrapped in a heavy layering of burlap that smelled sharply, unmistakably of decay.

Her face was a skull covered in parchment. Her lips were cracked open, bleeding from the cold. Her matted blonde hair hung in greasy, dirt-clotted ropes over her eyes.

But those eyes. Jesus, those eyes.

They were wide, and frantic, and burning with a feral, terrifying will to live. They tracked him like a trapped wolf tracks the man at the entrance of its den, no begging in them, no pleading. Just assessment. Just the endless, animal arithmetic of survival.

Wyatt knew those eyes.

He had seen them laughing at the counter of the feed store in town, arguing good-naturedly with the clerk about the price of chicken feed. He had seen them squinting against the sun at the county fair, watching her daughter — no, she didn’t have a daughter. Watching her husband, Tom, throw horseshoes and pretend not to notice her watching him.

“Clara,” Wyatt whispered.

The name felt heavy and wrong in his mouth, like a stone that had been dropped into a grave. Clara Hayes. She had vanished in early September, almost three full months ago now. The freak late-summer flash flood had washed out the lower canyon road, and they had found her pickup truck crushed against a bridge piling, half-submerged in muddy water. The windshield had been shattered. The cab had been empty. The sheriff had organized a search that lasted two weeks, and Wyatt himself had spent four days riding the riverbanks looking for a body caught up in the deadfall.

They had never found one.

In October, the town had held a memorial service. They’d put a plaque up by the church. Clara’s husband, Tom, had stood in the front row, looking hollowed out and broken, his big shoulders caved in like a barn after a fire. They had buried an empty casket, and everyone had accepted the arithmetic of it. The river took things. The river rarely gave them back.

Yet here she was. Twelve miles from the washout, high up in the unforgiving granite of Cutter’s Pass, in a cave, alive, breathing, watching him.

Clara shrank back against the rock wall, and her breath came in shallow, ragged hitches. She looked at Wyatt, but it was clear she wasn’t seeing him. Her mind was fractured by isolation and starvation and the relentless grinding pain of a shattered leg, gone somewhere far away from this cave, somewhere safer or somewhere worse.

“Tom,” she croaked.

Her voice was less than a whisper, a dry rasp of bone on stone.

Wyatt swallowed hard, fighting the tight knot forming in his throat. He dropped to one knee, ignoring the biting cold of the rock seeping through his denim. He pulled off his thick leather gloves and tossed them aside. He wanted her to see bare human hands.

“No, Clara. It’s Wyatt. Wyatt Miller, from the Double K. You remember. The old man with the roan and the bad temper.” He kept his hands up, visible, open. “I’m real, Clara. I’m right here.”

She stared at him, her chest heaving.

Adrien leaned his head down again and blew warm air onto her matted hair, and Clara’s trembling hand rose and buried itself in the horse’s thick mane. The physical contact seemed to anchor her. The wild, frantic look in her eyes slowly gave way to a sudden, devastating clarity.

She realized he was real.

Tears welled up in her eyes, cutting clean tracks through the thick dirt on her sunken cheeks. She opened her mouth to speak, and a violent shiver racked her entire body, rattling her teeth like dice in a cup.

“Don’t try to talk,” Wyatt said gruffly. “Don’t you try to talk. Save it.”

He unbuttoned his heavy sheepskin coat, pulled it off his shoulders, and wrapped it carefully around her frail, shivering frame. She weighed absolutely nothing. It was like wrapping a bundle of dry sticks in blankets. He looked at her leg, at the swelling around the knee, ugly and purple and mottled, and he thought about how close she was to the edge of everything.

It was a miracle infection hadn’t already killed her.

Three months. Three months she had dragged herself up here, built a shelter, hoarded fuel, survived on God knew what, roots and melted snow and maybe mice, and she had done it with a broken leg and a growing infection and nothing in the world but will.

You’re a tough one, Clara, he thought, and he pulled a silver flask from his saddlebag.