If you stay in this broken wagon, girl, the night frost will claim you and that unborn child before moonrise.
The air in the abandoned blacksmith shed hung heavy with the scent of cooled ash and damp earth. A single lantern, its wick barely trimmed, cast flickering shadows that danced across the rough stone walls.
Leo Kincaid knelt beside a workbench, his calloused fingers meticulously turning the piece of jagged metal in the light. It was the wagon’s axle pin, snapped clean through.
He held it out to me without a word.
My own fingers, still trembling from the cold and the shock of the past days, traced the break. The iron felt oddly smooth in places.
“It broke right where it was thinnest,” Leo’s voice was a low rumble, observing me.
I tilted the pin, angling it so the lantern light fell directly on the fractured surface. That’s when I saw them.
Tiny, metallic flecks, like fine, crimson dust, clung to the rough edges of the break. And beneath them, unmistakably, were parallel scores. Not random gouges from wear and tear.
These were the precise, even lines of a metal rasp.
My breath caught in my throat. It wasn’t an accident. The axle hadn’t simply given out under strain. Someone had filed it down, deliberately. Someone had made sure it would snap, leaving me stranded.
“Silas,” I whispered, the name a bitter taste on my tongue. The image of his slick, smiling face, the false concern in his eyes, solidified into something cold and menacing. He hadn’t just abandoned me. He’d tried to murder me.
Meanwhile, the warm, yellow glow of the Miner’s Rest tavern spilled onto South Pass City’s main street. Inside, the air was thick with pipe smoke and the clatter of poker chips.
Silas Gable, my uncle, stood by the bar, a half-empty glass of whiskey in his hand. His shoulders seemed to slump with a fabricated grief.
“Terrible thing, just terrible,” he sighed, shaking his head at the barkeep, old Mr. Jenkins. “My poor niece, Martha. And the baby, too. Both taken by the cholera.”
Mr. Jenkins nodded, wiping the bar with a rag. “Heard about it. Tragic, Silas. She was a pretty young thing.”
“A good girl,” Silas continued, his voice heavy with what he wanted everyone to believe was sorrow. “But fragile, you understand. Prone to… delusions, especially with the pregnancy.”
He paused, letting his words hang in the air, allowing the tavern patrons to absorb the implication.
“The strain of losing her husband,” he added, as if an afterthought. “It left her… quite unhinged, toward the end. Started saying the most outlandish things.”
A few men at a nearby table glanced up. Silas caught their eyes, offering a look of profound, weary sadness.
“Poor soul,” he murmured, taking a slow sip of his whiskey. “If anyone should claim to see her now, well, it’s the grief playing tricks on the mind. Or perhaps some desperate soul trying to impersonate a dead woman.”
He set his glass down, a subtle, triumphant gleam in his eyes, hidden behind the mask of sorrow. The seed of doubt, of “prairie brain fever,” was planted.
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