She Fell at His Feet Broken — He Stood Between Her and the Man Who Did It
Part 2
Silas would not stay gone long — she knew that as surely as she knew her own name — which left them perhaps two hours before he returned with company. Nell made coffee because her hands needed something to do, and told Jonas, in careful pieces, the shape of the last four years.
“I can’t leave you here tonight,” he said finally. Not a question. A fact, stated the way a man states weather.
She thought fast, the way she’d learned to think fast, and settled on the one place Silas never rode near. “There’s the old Reyes place, a mile north. Empty two years now, since—”
“The Reyes place?” Jonas repeated, too quick, too flat. “Thomas Reyes?”
She looked at him. He said nothing further, only nodded once and told her it would do, but she filed the reaction away the way she filed everything now — a fact that didn’t yet fit, waiting on a shelf for its match.
Jonas put her up behind him on his own horse, and they followed the creek crossing instead of the road, on Nell’s reckoning that Silas’s men would ride hard and straight while a slower, hidden path might let them vanish entirely. She knew the timing of Silas’s temper the way she knew weather signs — knew he’d stop first at the Red Elk Saloon to gather his nerve and his men before he came looking in earnest — and she built their head start around that certainty. They heard the riders anyway, sooner than she’d hoped, three or four coming hard from town, and cut for the Reyes barn from the blind side, hid the horse, and dropped into the old root cellar just as boots hit the yard above.
She heard Silas’s voice through the floorboards, performing authority for an audience, and beneath it the particular cold register she’d learned meant he had passed all the way through fury into something more dangerous. They slipped out through the second hatch into open pasture, where a second horse — picketed and dozing, belonging to one of Silas’s hired hands — stood at the fence line. It was Nell who tossed a stone toward the far end of the pasture and called out low, as if another rider were coming from that direction, drawing the young hand’s attention away just long enough for Jonas to cut the horse loose. He staked ten dollars and a note promising the animal’s return to the corral post before they mounted, one horse apiece now, and pushed hard for the Bozeman road until the sound of pursuit thinned and finally vanished behind them.
It was full dark, six miles out, before either of them spoke again beyond directions.
“You knew that name,” Nell said finally. “Reyes. You didn’t ask me a single question about the trouble Silas had with him. You just knew the shape of it already.”
Jonas was quiet long enough that she felt the answer before he gave it.
“I’ve been in this county eleven days,” he said. “Not passing through, exactly. I work for the territorial land office out of Helena. There have been complaints filed against your husband for going on two years — men whose land had changed hands through deeds they swore they’d never signed. I was riding out to look at the old Reyes claim myself when I came up that road today.” He glanced at her, steady in the dark. “I didn’t stop because I recognized the trouble, Nell. I stopped because it was in front of me and it was wrong. But I’d be lying if I said your husband’s name was new to me.”
She sat with that a long moment, the horse’s steady rhythm under her, the enormous dark sky overhead.
“Then I have something you need to see,” she said. “There’s a strongbox under our bed. I’ve never had the key. But I know the house, and I know we have to go before he thinks to move it.”
