Nothing. He adjusted the angle. Tried again. "Come on. Come on, you son of a—" His arms screamed, his back screamed louder.
Sweat poured into his eyes, and he didn't stop to wipe it because stopping meant losing every inch of ground he'd already fought for. Somewhere behind him, distantly, the eagle screamed too, like it was watching, like it wanted to see how this came out. The rock groaned, shifted an inch, then two. It was enough. Wade dropped the lever, lunged forward, and pulled her free by both shoulders in one desperate motion, dragging her clear, just as the mesquite trunk snapped in half behind him.
And the rock settled back down into the exact space where her leg had been lying a half second before. For a moment, he just knelt there in the dirt, breathing hard, staring at the space where she'd almost died, where he'd almost failed to stop it. Then he made himself move again because breathing hard doesn't save anybody. Only the moving does. The leg was swollen bad already, bruised near black in places.
Broken most likely, though the bone hadn't come through the skin small mercy. That the kind a man learns to be grateful for out here, even when the rest of the situation is nothing short of disaster. He'd seen worse breaks in his time, working cattle years back, before Sarah, before any of it. He knew how to splint one well enough to hold. He tore long strips from his own shirt, found two straight branches of ocotillo growing nearby, stripped the thorns off with his knife, set the leg as gently as his shaking hands could manage.
She moaned once, low and broken, but didn't wake, and bound it tight enough to hold steady, loose enough not to cut off what little blood was still moving through it. It wasn't doctor's work. It would have to be good enough because there wasn't going to be a doctor out here for 100 miles in any direction, and both of them knew it. Even if only one of them was conscious enough to know anything at all. That's when he noticed the necklace properly. turquoise strung through with a real eagle feather, the kind you didn't see on just anybody, the kind that meant something in a language Wade had never bothered to learn.
And on her wrist, a leather band worked with symbols he half recognized from Trading Post talk he'd never paid much real mind to, his stomach dropped somewhere down around his boots. This isn't just anybody's daughter. Well, he thought, lifting her carefully onto the front of his saddle, mindful of leg, mindful of everything. "Well, Wade, what in God's name have you gone and done now?" You went looking for trouble, and trouble found you first.