Martha was already standing on the bench, leaning forward to see into the dark. A tree had come down across the road. Not from wind. There wasn't wind enough tonight to drop a tree of that size. And not from rot because the sound it had made coming down was too clean for a rotten tree.
That was cut. Yes. Martha said recently. The horses would have smelled the sap otherwise. She said within the last hour, I'd guess.
They looked at the fallen tree and the fallen tree looked back at them in the silence of the mountains pressed in from all sides. Silas reached behind the bench and she heard the sound of something being picked up that was not a tool. Stay on the wagon, he said. Sila's voice was very quiet and very serious. Please stay on the wagon.
She stayed on the wagon. He was gone for 4 minutes. She counted. She sat on the bench in the dark and held the reigns of two nervous horses and counted and thought about three separateings and a letter from Walter Crane arriving 20 minutes after she found the pin. And she thought about the scratches on the fitting and the leather strip and the cut trace.
And she thought about the fact that she had documentation for all of it in her tool chest. And the tool chest was right behind her. And she thought about Henry who had died from cold after a winter freight run. And she wondered with the cold, terrible clarity of a woman sitting alone on a mountain road in the dark, whether Henry's death had been as straightforward as fever and pneumonia. Silas came back.
He came back the same direction he'd left, moving quietly for a large man, and he climbed back up beside her and took the res from her hands. "Gone now," went down the south ridge, he paused. "I found a handkerchief. It has a monogram on it." Martha went very still. What monogram?
She said he said. And for a moment there was nothing in the world except the cold and the dark and the sound of two horses breathing and the fact that someone had just tried for the fourth time today to make sure Silas Boon did not come home from his supply run. Martha reached into her apron pocket without thinking about it. The way you reached for the thing that steadied you when steadiness was required. And her hand closed around the old iron pin.
She'd never put down since she'd pulled it from the axle before dawn. She held it and breathed. "We need to go around the tree," she said. "There's a logging cut," Silas said 50 yards back. "It'll add an hour." "An hour is fine," Martha said.