He'd say, "Martha, somebody worked hard for that load and they're going to lose it if we don't stop." And that was the end of the argument. "Sounds like a good man," Sila said. "He was," Martha said simply. "He was a very good man." She felt him glance at her, but she kept her eyes on the road, and after a moment, he looked back at it, too. And they rode in the kind of silence that wasn't uncomfortable, so much as full of things that both of them had decided didn't need saying yet.
They were a mile into the climb when the near horse threw her head. It was a small thing, a small suspicious thing. The horse pulled sideways just slightly, the way horses did when something in the harness was wrong rather than something on the road. Silas felt it and steadied the reinss, and Martha was already leaning forward with her eyes on the harness traces. Martha, stop the wagon, Silas.
He pulled the team up. Martha was off the bench before the wagon fully stopped, which was not easy for a woman of her size, and she knew it, and she didn't care. She went straight to the near trace and ran her hands along it, and found the cut 2 ft from the collar, not clean through, not yet, but more than halfway, enough that another mile of sustained pull on the grade would have finished it at the worst possible moment. She turned and looked back at the wagon bench. Sis was looking at the trace in her hands.
Third thing he said very quietly. Third thing Martha confirmed. He was off the bench and beside her in three strides and he took the trace from her hands and looked at the cut himself and she saw the muscle jump in his jaw. This wasn't from where he said. No, she said where phrase from the outside in.
This was cut from the inside out. Someone who knew where to make a cut that wouldn't be obvious on a casual inspection. She took the trace back. I have spare leather work in my chest. I can splice this in about 15 minutes if you hold the horses.
He looked at her. You carry spare trace leather in your tool chest, he said. I carry 17 things in my tool chest that most people think are excessive, Martha said, already moving toward the wagon. I have never once in 10 years been sorry for a single one of them. She climbed up to get her chest open.
Hold the near horse, please. She's still nervous. She heard him move to the horse's head and speak to it low, the way men who knew horses did not words exactly, more like the sound of a voice being steady and reliable, telling the animal without language that the alarming thing was handled, and the person in charge was not alarmed. The horse settled. Martha worked quickly.
15 minutes was optimistic, but she was close to optimistic. 12 minutes actually and she was back on her feet with a splice that she would not have called beautiful but that she would stand behind on any grade in the Bitterroot mountains. She checked the other three traces while she was there. They were fine. She climbed back up to the bench and Silas let the near horse go and came back up beside her and took the reinss again.