There was a silence. Martha exhaled slowly, got herself turned on the board, and worked her way out from under the wagon the same way she'd gotten under it slowly, carefully, without any grace to speak of. Her wide body cleared the wagon frame, and she pushed herself to sitting in the dirt, breathing hard, one hand pressed to her lower back, the wrench still gripped in the other. She looked up. The man standing above her was one of the largest human beings she had ever seen in her life.
He was well over 6 feet, built like something the mountains themselves had assembled, with arms that strained the seams of a sleeveless leather vest and a chest that would have made a draft horse feel insecure. His hair was dark and long, worn loose around his shoulders, and a heavy beard covered the lower half of a face that might have been handsome once before years of weather and wind and whatever else this mountain had put him through had settled into it like rings in a tree trunk. He was staring down at her with an expression she couldn't quite read. Somewhere between startled and deeply confused. Martha became aware of what she must look like.
She was a large woman. She had always been a large woman, and she had long since stopped pretending otherwise or apologizing for it. Nearly 150 kg of her sat in the dirt of this man's ranchyard, dress covered in grease. One cheek probably smeared with it too, braid half fallen and full of dust. Breathing like she'd been running rather than lying still for 2 hours.
She probably looked like something that had fallen off the back of a supply wagon herself. She wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist. It didn't help. "Who are you?" He said. His voice was deep.
Not unkind exactly, but not warm either. Flat and blunt the way men got when they most their time alone and had forgotten how to soften the edges of a sentence. Martha Whitaker," she said. He looked at the house. He looked at the yard.
He looked back down at her. "Then where is my new housekeeper?" Martha looked up at him steadily. "You're looking at her." He stared at her for a long moment. She could see him trying to reconcile whatever picture he'd had in his head with what was currently sitting in the dirt in front of him. And she could see it wasn't going smoothly.
She didn't give him time to work through it. She reached into the pocket of her apron and pulled out the pin she'd worked loose from the axle assembly and she held it up between them in the early morning halflight. "Your axle pin," she said. "Someone replaced your original with this one." She watched his eyes drop to the pin. "See how the threading is worn?
That isn't age, that's filing. Someone took a good pin out and put a bad one in its place." She turned it so he could see the filed surface clearly. You were planning to take this wagon down the path this morning, weren't you? It wasn't a question. She'd seen the loaded tarps on the wagon bed.