Chapter 1 - The Girl They Marched Out of Town
Pine Hollow marched eighteen-year-old Rebecca Boon out of town beneath three rifles.
None of those rifles pointed directly at her.
They did not need to.
Everybody understood what the guns meant.
Rebecca walked ahead of Sheriff Wyatt Kums, mercantile owner Harlon Puit, and freightman Delbert Marsh with a wool bedroll strapped across her shoulder and eleven dollars and forty cents hidden inside the lining of her dress. Her father’s single-shot rifle rode in the hands of old Micah Hollister, who waited farther down Church Street beside a saddled bay mare.
It was a bright autumn morning, cruelly beautiful.
Smoke rose from chimneys. Laundry moved on clotheslines. The church bell had rung not twenty minutes earlier, and somewhere behind the mercantile a child was laughing.
Rebecca kept walking.
Yesterday, Pine Hollow had been the only home she remembered.
Today it belonged to everyone except her.
Her father had been buried nine days earlier.
Silas Boon had not died dramatically. There had been no gunfight, no runaway wagon, no heroic last words beneath a storm-darkened sky.
He had simply gotten sick.
He had worked through it because there had been debts.
Then he had become too weak to stand.
Then one cold morning Rebecca had found him staring at the window without seeing it.
After the burial, Harlon Puit had arrived carrying a leather folder.
Her father, he explained, had accumulated unpaid accounts.
Flour.
Lamp oil.
Harness repairs.
Medicine.
Seed.
Rebecca had listened while Harlon spoke as though he were reading weather observations.
When she asked to see the original account books, Harlon told her there was no need.
When she asked whether she might work the debt, he said the matter had already been settled.
When she asked who had settled it, Sheriff Kums had stepped through the door.
That answered enough.
Three men had met privately in the back room of Harlon’s mercantile.
By supper, Rebecca’s childhood home no longer belonged to her.
Rebecca signed nothing.
The paper simply informed her what had been decided.
Now the town was making certain she understood.
People watched as she passed.
Mrs. Talley stood behind the lace curtain of her boardinghouse.
The blacksmith stopped hammering.
Two women whose laundry Rebecca had washed for nearly a year remained inside the bakery.
Mr. Cray, who had borrowed Silas Boon’s wagon every spring for eight years, suddenly discovered something fascinating about his boots.
Rebecca did not ask anybody for help.
That was perhaps what made several of them look ashamed.
She touched the small wooden button hanging beneath her collar.
Her mother, Hannah, had carved it when Rebecca was a little girl.
Not beautifully.
One edge was thicker than the other. The holes were uneven.
Rebecca had once complained about that.
Hannah had laughed.
“Then nobody can mistake it for anybody else’s.”
Six years had passed since Hannah disappeared.
There had been rumors.
A stagecoach accident.
Another man.
A robbery on the north road.
A body never found.
Silas had rejected every rumor.
Rebecca eventually stopped asking him what he believed.
Over her heart, she had continued carrying Hannah’s button.
“Keep it on you, girl,” her mother had once told her. “So you always know somebody made a thing for you.”
At the end of Church Street, Micah Hollister waited beside his bay mare, Juno.
Micah was nearly seventy, narrow as fence wire, with a gray beard and eyes that seemed permanently narrowed against distant weather.
He had known Rebecca’s father longer than Rebecca had been alive.
He had said almost nothing at the burial.
Now he ignored the armed men walking behind her.
He took Rebecca’s bedroll, tied it behind Juno’s saddle, and slipped Silas’s rifle into the scabbard.
“I packed oats,” he said.
Rebecca glanced at him.
“You shouldn’t have.”
“Probably not.”
“And a canteen?”
“Probably shouldn’t have done that either.”
Something tightened in Rebecca’s throat.
She looked away before gratitude became tears.
Harlon stopped twenty feet behind them.
“You understand you’re not to return?”
His voice carried clearly enough for half the street to hear.
Rebecca rested one hand on Juno’s saddle.
Then she turned.
Harlon was a broad man with carefully trimmed whiskers and clothes that always looked too expensive for Pine Hollow. Delbert Marsh stood beside him, expressionless. Sheriff Kums leaned against the stock of his rifle.
Rebecca looked past them.
She looked at the street.
The windows.
The porch where her father had once repaired a broken rocking chair.
The church steeple.
The roof of the house that had stopped being hers because three men had decided it should.
“Yes,” Rebecca said.
Harlon nodded.
He apparently heard surrender in the word.
Rebecca mounted Juno.
She never promised not to survive them.
Micah walked beside the mare until the town disappeared behind a rise.
Only then did Rebecca speak.
“Where am I supposed to go?”
Micah kept his attention on the trail.
“There’s a valley over the ridge.”
Rebecca waited.
“Old line shack beside a creek. Good grass. Broken fences.”
“Anyone there?”
“Not in twenty years.”
“Whose valley?”
Micah slowed.
That hesitation frightened her more than anything he might have said immediately.
Finally he answered.
“No one’s that’s coming to ask after it.”
Rebecca looked at him.
“That doesn’t sound like ownership.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then what is it?”
“Somewhere.”
Rebecca almost laughed.
Instead she looked toward the mountains.
For now, somewhere was enough.
At the fork in the trail, Micah stopped.
“You follow the northern ridge. Stay with the creek after you descend. Shack sits below three ponderosas.”
“You’re not coming?”
“If I go farther, folks will say I helped you establish a claim.”
“You are helping me.”
“Folks don’t need to know everything true.”
He placed one hand on Juno’s neck.
“Winter comes early in that valley.”
Rebecca nodded.
Micah looked at her for several seconds.
Then he said something strange.
“If you find anything that belonged to the man who lived there, don’t bring it straight back to Pine Hollow.”
Rebecca frowned.
“What man?”
But Micah had already stepped away.
“Go before the light changes.”
“Micah.”
He finally met her eyes.
“Some things stayed buried a long time for a reason.”
Rebecca stared at him.
Then Micah turned toward Pine Hollow.
Rebecca watched until he vanished behind the ridge.
The trail became steeper.
Loose shale slid beneath Juno’s hooves.
Once, Rebecca dismounted to lead the mare across a washed-out section and fell hard enough to split the skin on her knee.
She sat in the dirt for nearly a minute.
Nobody came to help.
Nobody told her to stand.
There was something terrible about that.
There was also something freeing.
Rebecca stood.
“Come on, Juno.”
The mare followed.
Hours later they reached the ridge.
Rebecca stopped.
Below her lay a hidden valley.
Grass rolled across the basin in long golden-green waves. A clear creek reflected the descending sun. Pine forests climbed the farther slopes, and gray mountains stood beyond them like broken teeth.
Beneath three ponderosas sat a crooked wooden shack.
It looked forgotten.
Rebecca smiled despite herself.
“Somewhere,” she whispered.
Juno flicked an ear.
They reached the shack near sunset.
The roof sagged but remained mostly intact.
A lean-to provided shelter for Juno.
Inside were a narrow bunk, rough table, stool, tin cup, rusted skillet, abandoned tools, and a squat iron stove.
Rebecca checked the chimney.
Then she gathered deadwood.
The first fire smoked badly.
The second attempt caught.
By the time flames warmed the stove, darkness had begun filling the valley.
Rebecca sat on the floor.
For the first time since her father died, nobody was waiting for her to make a decision.
She did not know whether that felt peaceful or terrifying.
Then she saw something hanging from the west wall.
A wooden button.
Rebecca stood slowly.
She removed it from the peg.
The button was old and smooth, carved by hand.
Her breath stopped.
She reached beneath her collar and pulled out Hannah’s button.
Almost the same size.
Different grain.
Different carving.
Different hands.
Yet similar enough that Rebecca’s skin prickled.
Someone had kept this little piece of wood.
Why?
Rebecca looked around the room differently now.
The shack no longer seemed empty.
It seemed abandoned in the middle of a sentence.
She examined the table.
The bunk.
The walls.
Then the floor.
The third plank from the north wall had a worn edge.
Beside it was a narrow gouge.
Rebecca crouched.
She took out the folding knife Widow Amory had quietly given her months earlier.
She worked the blade beneath the board.
At first nothing happened.
Then the plank shifted.
Rebecca froze.
She pulled again.
The board lifted.
Beneath it was darkness.
She reached inside.
Her fingers touched cloth.
No.
Oilcloth.
Rebecca gripped it with both hands and pulled.
The object beneath the floor was much heavier than expected.
She dragged it into the firelight.
A large bundle wrapped in stained oilcloth and bound with old cord lay at her knees.
Rebecca stared at it.
Twenty years of dust clung to the wrapping.
She reached for the knot.
Outside, Juno suddenly snorted.
Rebecca stopped.
The valley was silent.
Then she heard something far away.
A horse.
Maybe two.
Rebecca turned toward the door.
The sound disappeared.
She looked back at the bundle.
The stranger who had hidden it had been gone for twenty years.
Yet somebody might already be coming to find it.
May you like
Rebecca tightened her fingers around Widow Amory’s knife.
And began cutting the cord.
