They Gave the Widow a Paralyzed Mountain Man to Break Her. By Spring, He Was the Only Man in Wyoming Nobody Dared Laugh At
The first thing Maggie Harper heard was laughter.
Not the warm kind that drifted from church picnics or card tables after payday. This was the sharp, slicing kind, the sort that came from people who were relieved the trouble belonged to somebody else. It rolled across the town square of Dry Timber, Wyoming Territory, and caught under the awning posts and wagon wheels until it sounded like the whole town had gathered to watch a hanging.
In a way, they had.
Maggie stood at the front of the crowd in a faded blue dress she had scrubbed so many times the fabric had gone soft as paper. Her husband had been dead fourteen months. Fourteen months since Luke Harper had gone from a broad-backed rancher with sun-cracked hands to a body under six feet of hard prairie dirt. Fourteen months of bills, threats, delayed feed shipments, and kind-faced neighbors who turned their heads whenever Silas Mercer walked by. The Harper ranch sat on a strip of land with a year-round spring, and that spring was worth more than decency in Dry Timber.
Everybody knew Mercer wanted it.
He owned the mercantile, the livery, the freight contracts, and half the mortgages in three counties. He was the sort of man who never raised his voice because he had paid other men to do that for him. He smiled often, especially when someone else was cornered. And on Founder’s Day, when the town held its annual charity labor auction for widows and old folks needing help before winter, he arranged the sort of humiliation a powerful man believes is clever.
Mayor Pritchard cleared his throat on the platform and said, “Next lot is for Mrs. Maggie Harper. Paid five dollars for a week’s labor, fair and square.”
Maggie’s chin stayed high. Five dollars had taken her six weeks to scrape together. She needed a pair of strong arms to reset the south fence and shore up the cattle shed before the first freeze. She had expected a ranch hand. Maybe a young drifter. Maybe a carpenter down on luck.
Instead, two of Mercer’s men dragged a splintered flatbed cart into the square.
A canvas tarp covered whatever lay on it. The crowd leaned in. Somebody near the back snorted. Somebody else said, “Lord, no,” and then laughed anyway.
Mercer stepped forward in a black broadcloth coat too fine for the place, thumbs hooked into his vest. “Folks,” he said, pitching his voice wide enough for the far edge of the crowd, “we all know Mrs. Harper’s had a difficult year. Seems only right we provide her with a man big enough to carry her burdens.”
He yanked the tarp back.
The laughter faltered first. Then came the gasp.
The man on the cart was enormous even half-starved, broad in the shoulders, built like the side of a barn. A leather strap pinned him against a rough backboard. His beard had grown wild, dark and matted, and one cheek was hollow where too many meals had been skipped. He wore a ruined buckskin coat and a look in his gray eyes that made three women in the front row take a step back.
Maggie recognized him a heartbeat later.
Cal Boone.
Everybody west of Cheyenne knew Cal Boone. He had guided prospectors through Black Elk Pass, trapped winter wolves bare-handed if the stories were to be believed, and once hauled a wounded surveyor six miles on his back after a blizzard took the horses. Three months ago, a rockslide at the old Fremont silver cut had crushed him. The town doctor saved his life, but not his legs. Since then, Boone had disappeared into the category frontier towns invented for broken men: not dead, not useful, and therefore inconvenient.
Mercer spread his hands as though he were giving away a prize bull. “There you are, Mrs. Harper. A mountain man. Yours for the week.”
A few ugly chuckles rose again. Someone muttered, “Hell of a joke.” Someone else said, “Better than nothing.”