Part 3
Adrian got to his feet slowly, and Wyatt rubbed warmth back into the horse’s shoulder before settling the saddle. Clara tried to rise while Wyatt was tightening the girth. The attempt folded her against the cave wall. He caught her before the injured leg touched ground.
“Let me do the lifting,” he said.
“I can hold on.” She looked toward Adrian, not at the drop beyond the entrance. “Tell me where.”
He showed her the saddle horn and warned her before he lifted. Her good foot found the stirrup; the splinted leg rested where it could without bearing weight. Wyatt looped his lariat around her waist and secured it to the saddle horn, leaving room for her to breathe. He disliked the rope, but if fever took her strength on the trail, she could not stay upright by will alone.
She caught at the saddle when her bad leg shifted. Wyatt stopped at once. He waited for her to find a position she could bear, then checked the knot again. It would be his job to untie it quickly at the bottom. He gave Clara the end of the blanket to pull tight around her shoulders. She did it herself, with the concentration of someone setting out on a task that would use everything she had.
“Hold here,” he told her. “If I stop, you stay still until I come back.”
Clara nodded once. Adrian waited through the fumbling with tack as patiently as he had waited at the cave. Wyatt took the reins and started down on foot. He cut a branch for a staff and pushed it into the snow ahead of his boots. Some steps met stone. Others broke through into gaps between buried rocks, wrenching his ankle before he could pull free.
The climb had been hard to see; the descent was too easy to imagine. Under its white cover the mountain appeared gentle, but Wyatt remembered every place where shale had shifted. He led Adrian close to the inner wall, pausing whenever the horse needed to choose his own footing. Clara leaned forward without crowding his neck. She said little. When Wyatt looked back, her eyes were closed, then open again as she felt him watching.
He tried to keep track of the turns. A dead pine had marked the worst switchback on the way up; now only its highest branches showed. Wyatt tested the slope on hands and knees before asking Adrian to cross. The roan followed one deliberate step at a time, his iron shoes finding what Wyatt’s boots could not.
At a shelf where the wind had scoured the stone almost bare, Wyatt finally recognized the pale granite he had marked on the ascent. He could have hurried there. Instead he let Adrian stand and breathe, and he checked Clara’s hands. Her fingers had gone pale around the horn. She opened and closed them when he asked, then fixed them back in place. Wyatt knew she was trying to spare him worry. He had no strength to spend pretending she had succeeded.
An hour into the descent, Wyatt’s toes had gone numb. He could feel the stiffness in his right knee each time he lowered himself onto a new patch of rock. He thought about the coffee in the cave and how little Clara had eaten. Her fever seemed to come in waves. When she could speak, she asked how far. When she could not, he kept the answer to himself and watched her grip on the horn.
The trail narrowed above a drop. Wyatt planted his staff into the drift and struck something slick underneath. He searched for a foothold to the left. His boot slid before it found one, and he landed on his bad knee. The reins jerked through his hand.
Adrian’s near forefoot had skated over the buried ice. The horse pitched toward the open edge, his hind feet scrabbling for rock. Clara made a small sound and clamped herself to the saddle. Wyatt could not have hauled the weight of horse and rider uphill. He braced against the inner wall and held the reins just firmly enough to give Adrian a line back toward it.
“Come on,” Wyatt said. “Find it.”
The gelding struck stone with one hind shoe, then the other. He gathered himself and drove sideways, away from the drop. Wyatt’s shoulder hit the wall. Adrian stood trembling on the safer side of the track while a loosened sheet of snow slipped past them and disappeared below.
Wyatt waited until his own hands obeyed him again. Clara had slumped over the horn, still held by the rope. He climbed to her and touched her cheek. She stirred. Her breathing was shallow, but steady. He adjusted the blanket around her shoulders and walked back to the horse’s head.
“Good,” he told Adrian, pressing his forehead briefly to the damp red neck. “That’s enough of that.”
They reached the pines before noon. The grade eased, and the snow thinned where the trees had caught it. Wyatt kept walking because he could feel his legs would seize if he stopped. By midafternoon they came onto an unplowed logging road across the valley floor. Its straight stretch looked almost extravagant after the mountain.
On the gentler ground he listened for Clara instead of watching the edge of the path. She answered when he said her name, though sometimes he had to ask twice. Adrian’s pace settled into the familiar rhythm Wyatt knew from long days returning to the Double K. The horse’s ears drooped with fatigue. Wyatt wanted to take the weight off his back, but the road was empty, and Clara could not walk. He kept the reins short and looked ahead for help.
He heard a diesel engine before he saw the truck. A flatbed rounded the bend, crawling along the fresh snow with its headlights on. Wyatt recognized Jim Dawson’s rig and raised one arm. Jim braked and got out, already calling Wyatt’s name. Then he saw the woman tied into Adrian’s saddle and stopped halfway across the road.
“Is that Clara Hayes?” Jim asked.
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