Under normal rotation, it would do nothing. But under sustained speed, under the heat of a long downhill grade with a loaded bed, it would tighten itself around the hub like a slow fist. The axle would heat, the grease would burn off, and by the time the wheel started wobbling, you'd already be going too fast to do much about it. She worked it loose with two fingers and held it up in the gray morning light. This was not the same person being careless with a replacement pin.
This was someone who understood wagons, someone who had done this before or had it done for them by someone who had. Martha put the strip in her apron pocket and got herself out from under the wagon. Silas was at the barn when she came around the corner, checking the harness on the near horse with the practiced efficiency of a man who had done the same task 10,000 times. He glanced at her face and his hand slowed on the harness. "What'd you find?" He said.
She put the leather strip on the fence rail beside him. He looked at it. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands, and she watched him understand what it was and where it had been. And his jaw set in a way that changed the whole geography of his face. "Two separate things," he said.
"Two separate preparations," Martha said. "The pin first, because a missing wheel on a loaded wagon going downhill is fast and definitive. But if someone suspected the pin might be found or fixed before you left, the strip was the backup." Harder to trace, you'd make it a few miles before the hub started failing. And by then, by then I'd be on the grade, Silas said. Yes.
He set the strip back on the rail and was quiet for a moment. She could see him working through it the same way she had. And she waited because she'd learned that some men needed space to arrive at a conclusion themselves, and some men needed to be handed it directly. And she didn't yet know which kind Silas Boon was. Crany said, "That's where I'd start looking." Martha said.
But I don't have proof of that yet. I have two pieces of evidence that someone tampered with your wagon deliberately. What I don't have is a name on paper. Silas looked at her. Crane sent that rider here not 20 minutes after you found the pin.
He did. That's an odd coincidence. It is. Martha agreed. But odd coincidences aren't proof.
They're reasons to look harder. She untied her apron and folded it over the fence rail. Are we still going? Are you still coming? He said.