There are men down there who want to put you in a cell. Or worse, if you show your face, Pritchard will know exactly where you are. Let him know, Millie said. She walked over to him, her eyes hard. I am tired of living like a ghost.
Jonah, I am tired of jumping at shadows and wondering if every sound in the wind is a deputy coming to drag me away. If I stay here alone, listening to the silence, I will go mad. I would rather face fear than rot in it. Jonah looked at the resolve in her face. He saw the tremble in her hands she was trying to hide.
But he saw the steel in her spine, too. He knew that look. It was the look of a soldier who was done digging trenches and ready to charge, even if the charge was suicide. He sighed, a rough sound that scraped his throat. If you come, you do exactly what I say, Jonah said.
You do not speak to anyone. You stay close enough to me that a knife cannot pass between us. I can do that, Millie said. Jonah went to the peg by the door and took down his spare coat. It was a heavy buffalo hide coat, immense and shaggy, smelling of wood smoke and old tobacco.
He held it out. Put this on, he said, and wrap your head. You look like a trapper's boy, not Millie Laroo. She put the coat on. It swallowed her hole.
The sleeves hung past her hands, and the hem dragged near her ankles. She wrapped a woolen scarf around her head and neck, pulling it up until only her eyes and the bridge of her nose were visible. Jonah checked his revolver. He spun the cylinder, checking the loads. Five beans in the wheel, hammer down on an empty chamber.
He slid it back into the holster and tied the leather thong over the hammer. Let's go, he said. The descent was a nightmare of slush and treacherous ice. The trail, barely a scratch on the side of the mountain, was slick with runoff where the sun had touched it and hard as iron in the shadows. They rode in silence.
Jonah leading on his bay geling, Millie following on the packor. They took the old game trail that cut behind the ridge, a path used only by deer and desperate men. It added an hour to the ride, but it kept them off the main wagon road where the timber crews moved. When they finally broke out of the tree line and saw the town of Silverton sprawled in the valley below, it hit them like a physical blow after the profound living silence of the high ridge. The town was a chaotic assault.
The air was thick with the acrid yellow smoke of coal fires and the smelter stacks. The noise was a dull roar. steam whistles, the clang of the blacksmith's hammer, the shouting of teamsters, the bark of dogs. Millie stiffened in the saddle. Jonah saw her posture tighten, her shoulders hunching under the heavy coat. She looked small against the backdrop of the noisy, dirty world.
He dropped his horse back until he was riding beside her, his knee brushing the stirrup of her saddle. "Head down," Jonah murmured. "Look at the horse's ears. Do not look at the men. " They rode into the slushy mud of the main street. The town was busy, filled with miners down from the high camps and railway men moving freight before the winter locked the passes for good.
It was a hard town, built by hard men for the purpose of ripping silver out of the earth. There was no softness here. They tied the horses at the rail outside the mercantile. Jonah helped Millie down. Her legs were stiff from the ride and she stumbled slightly.