He Came Down the Mountain for Flour and Bullets — Then Rode Home With the Woman Everyone Had Abandoned

“We need to deal with this before dark,” she said, steadier than her hands.

“Yes.”

“You’re bleeding,” she said — splinters from the wood pile along his cheekbone, which he’d forgotten about.

“I’m fine.”

“I know. Let me look anyway.”

They worked through the afternoon without stopping, because the work didn’t allow for pausing long enough to feel the full weight of it, which was probably a mercy. Ronan led the two horses to the lean-to and watered them, because the animals hadn’t done anything wrong. The ground was too frozen for proper burial, so they carried the bodies to a rocky draw on the north side of the property where the snow still lay heavy, and burned the saddles and gear in the fire pit until nothing was left to tell a story to anyone who came looking. The guns they kept.

“We can’t keep the horses here,” Evelyn said, scrubbing her hands at the basin. “Someone will come looking eventually.”

“There’s a man on the lower trail, Beckwith. Runs cattle, keeps to himself. I’ve traded with him.” Ronan thought it through. “I’ll take them down tomorrow. Tell him I found them loose on the pass.”

“And if the younger man talks when he gets back to Red Mercy?”

“Hired men who walk away from a job don’t generally advertise it. And Grady doesn’t have anyone left to report to. The constable answers to the mine company, and the mine company isn’t going to spend money investigating what happened to Silas Grady on behalf of men who hired out their guns.” He folded the rag. “It’s not worth it to them.”

“You sound certain.”

“I’m not certain. I’m calculating probabilities.” He looked at her. “Nothing’s certain.”

“I know,” she said, and didn’t ask him to promise more than the honest odds — one of the things about her he’d stopped noticing because it had become simply part of what she was.

The next morning he took the horses down to Beckwith’s on the lower trail, a four-hour round trip through mud that worsened as the melt accelerated. Beckwith asked exactly one question — “These shod recent?” — and when Ronan said yes, looked at him with the incurious eyes of a man who’d lived adjacent to difficult situations long enough to know when information was more trouble than it was worth. “I’ll take them,” Beckwith said, and that was that.

Ronan made the climb back up in the early afternoon, boots caked to the ankle, and when the cabin came into view over the last rise he stopped for a moment, the way he had in Henley’s store six months before, noticing something without meaning to. Smoke from the chimney. The lean-to door propped the way she propped it when she was working inside. The sound of the hatchet on wood, confident now, nothing like the tentative chopping of that first autumn morning. Small, ordinary evidence of a place that was occupied and tended and alive. The cabin had stopped being a place of exile sometime around January, so gradually there was no date to mark, the way light changes through a winter afternoon — not in any single perceptible increment, but undeniably different from one end of it to the other.

They ate dinner late, both moving with the mechanical quality of people running on the day’s last reserves. Sitting with his coffee afterward, Ronan understood that what had struck him hardest wasn’t the violence itself — the mountain had produced its share of that before, and so had he, in years before Black Hollow. What struck him was the door opening. The four seconds between it opening and the shot had been the longest four seconds he’d felt since Cal went into the snow eleven years ago, and the feeling those four seconds produced in him didn’t have a ready category, because he’d spent a decade making sure never to be in a situation where that feeling was possible again.

“You should have stayed inside,” he said.