Chapter 4
Not cruelly. He had rarely laughed at her openly. His contempt had been quieter than that.
“Planning to rope cattle from the parlor?” he had asked.
“No,” she had replied. “Planning not to remain ignorant merely because someone enjoys my ignorance.”
Now the knot tightened around the pine root.
Henrietta gave it her full weight.
It held.
“Calvin!”
“What?”
“I have an anchor.”
“Is it solid?”
“It is attached to Wyoming.”
“That does not answer my question.”
“It is the best answer available.”
She shifted the rope from her waist and wound it around her gloved forearm, leaving enough slack to descend. The ravine waited beneath her like an open mouth.
For the first time since leaving the cabin, Henrietta allowed herself to look directly into it.
She wished she had not.
Snow spun downward between jagged walls of rock. Thirty feet below Calvin, perhaps forty, the slope steepened into a broken chute that vanished behind blowing white. One wrong movement could send both of them beyond the rope’s reach. Her stomach twisted.
Calvin saw where she was looking.
“Now you understand.”
Henrietta swallowed. “I understood before.”
“No, you didn’t.”
She looked at him.
His face was strained with pain, but the anger had gone. In its place was something she had never seen from him before.
Pleading.
“Henrietta, stay where you are.”
She tested the rope again. “No.”
“I can wait.”
“For what?”
“Storm to ease. Someone to come looking.”
“Who?”
He did not answer.
She nodded once. “Precisely.”
“The rope may hold me.”
“Your leg may not.”
“I know my own leg.”
“You cannot even see it.”
“I can feel enough.”
“And that, Mr. Brooks, is why I am coming down.”
She turned onto her side and eased herself over the broken edge.
The world changed immediately. Above the shelf, the storm had been a force battering her face. Below it, beneath the lee of the ravine wall, the wind became a moaning pressure overhead. Snow still sifted down, but the rock beside her was visible now—dark, glassy, streaked with ice.
Henrietta lowered herself hand over hand.
Her boots searched for holds and found almost none. She let the rope carry more of her weight than she liked. The root above creaked once.
She froze.
Calvin looked up.
Neither spoke.
The root held.
Henrietta moved again.
When she reached him, she discovered the situation was worse than she had believed from above. Calvin had landed on a narrow shelf no wider than a church bench. His back was jammed against the rock, his right leg stretched awkwardly along the ledge while his left disappeared beneath a slab of snow-packed stone. His boot had wedged into a crack, twisting the leg at the shin.