She didn't knock. She didn't wait. While the mountain man slept, the fat widow dragged herself beneath his broken wagon in the dark alone in the freezing Montana dirt because she saw what nobody else had noticed. Someone had tried to kill him. And she wasn't about to let that happen to another person she couldn't save.
The wrench slipped. Martha Whitaker felt it go before she heard the clang of iron hitting frozen ground, and she bit down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from making a sound. Not because anyone was listening, not because anyone was nearby, but because Martha had learned a long time ago that a woman making noise when she struggled got one of two things: pity or laughter, and she didn't have room beneath this wagon for either one. She reached sideways in the dark, fingers spread wide across the cold earth, searching by touch until the wrench handle found her palm again. She wrapped both hands around it this time.
Her breathing was loud beneath the wagon boards. Her arms ached. The rolling board she'd set herself on wasn't wide enough, and every small shift of her body sent a protest through her lower back. But Martha pressed her lips together and went back to work. The axle pin was wrong.
She'd seen it the moment she walked past this wagon in the gray pre-dawn light, coming up the ranch road with her tool chest dragging behind her and her heart already braced for whatever reception was waiting. She hadn't even reached the front door when something made her stop. Something in the angle of the wheel, a tilt that had no good reason for being there. Martha had set down her chest, pulled out her lantern, and looked. Then she'd looked again because what she was seeing didn't make any sense at all unless it was deliberate.
She'd gone back to her chest, taken out her board, and gotten herself down onto the ground without another thought. That had been nearly 2 hours ago. The sky above the Bitterroot Mountains was beginning to turn from black to the deep bruised purple that came just before dawn started bleeding at the edges, and Martha was still underneath a stranger's wagon. Her good dress ruined with grease and mountain dirt. Trying to understand why someone had filed down an iron pin until it was barely holding the wheel to the axle at all.
A fully loaded freight wagon would have finished that pin off before the first bend on Blackwater Pass. Martha knew Blackwater Pass. She knew what the road looked like where it dropped toward the canyon. She knew what happened to wagons that lost a wheel on that grade. She put her back into the wrench and kept working.
She didn't hear him coming until his boot stopped right beside the wagon wheel and then a large hand closed around the wagon's sideboard hard enough to make the whole frame shudder. Don't touch that wheel. The words came out of her before she could stop them sharp and immediate. Because if he rocked that wagon right now with the pin in the condition it was in, the whole right side was going to drop and she was going to be underneath it. The hand pulled back.