Chapter Twenty-Eight
Buck’s hooves tore up the dark road in a rhythm that matched the frantic hammering of Henry’s own heart. Each stride carried him further from the ranch and closer, he prayed, to wherever Ruth had gone.
He had left Lola sobbing in James’s arms not ten minutes before, her small face pressed into her uncle’s shoulder.
The sound of her crying still rang in his ears louder than the wind rushing past him now.
James had promised to sit with her until she slept or until Henry returned, whichever came first. Henry had not trusted himself to say more than a rough thank you before swinging up into the saddle and driving his heels into Buck’s flanks.
The night had turned colder than it had any right to in late summer, or perhaps it only felt that way because fear had settled so deep into Henry’s chest that no amount of exertion seemed to warm him.
The prairie stretched dark and silent on either side of the road, broken only by the occasional call of a nightjar or the distant, mournful howl of a coyote somewhere out past the fence lines.
Overhead, the thin moon offered little more than a suggestion of light, just enough to keep Buck’s hooves from the worst ruts in the road.
Henry’s mind raced faster than his horse.
Ruth has no horse. That thought alone should have offered some comfort.
A woman on foot could not have traveled far in the time since she’d left the ranch.
Still, it did nothing to ease the tightness in his chest, because a woman on foot, alone in the dark, was in some ways more vulnerable than one who could outrun danger.
If Gideon Walker found her on that road with nothing but her own two feet beneath her, there would be no getting away at all.
He tried to think as she might have thought.
She might have made for the crossroads, hoping for a farmer’s wagon or a late coach heading toward whatever position she’d mentioned in some town two counties over.
But surely, Henry reasoned, forcing himself to slow his racing, surely she would not attempt that walk alone, not at night.
Which left Weatherford itself. If there was one place in this town that had ever felt like home to Ruth, one place she might turn to instinctively, the way a frightened animal returns to the last safe den it can remember, it would be that small white church at the edge of town.
Henry pushed Buck harder. By the time the first buildings of Weatherford came into view, the streets lay dark and empty.
Henry hauled Buck to a stop outside the church.
He was in such a hurry that he nearly stumbled as he swung down from the saddle.
Without bothering to tie off the reins properly, he took the steps two at a time.
The door gave way beneath his hand with more force than he intended. It swung open and banged against the wall inside, the sound echoing through the empty building like a gunshot.
“Ruth!” His voice tore through the silence. As he searched the pews for her, moonlight fell in pale slants through the tall windows, illuminating dust motes stirred up by his own entrance. “Ruth?” he called again.
But no answering voice came, no figure rose from any pew. Only silence followed, and the faint creak of the old building settling around him, indifferent to his panic.
He moved further into the church, but no one was there and his heart sank. If she wasn’t here, then where was she? He was turning back toward the door when a lamp flared to life somewhere behind the pulpit.
“Henry?”
Pastor Luke emerged from the small side door that led to his study, his spectacles pushed up onto his forehead as though he’d been roused from reading. “Son, what in the world—”
Whatever composure Henry had managed to hold together on the ride into town broke apart entirely at the sound of that familiar voice.
“She’s gone.” The words came out cracked, barely recognizable as his own. “Ruth—Nora. She left the ranch tonight, alone, and I—”
He dragged a hand across his face and, to his own horror, felt his eyes burning. “I let her go, Pastor. I had her right there in front of me, and I let her walk out into the dark because I was too much a coward to ask her to stay.”
Pastor Luke crossed the sanctuary quickly, setting the lamp down on the nearest pew, his weathered face creased with concern. “Sit down, Henry. Tell me everything.”
“There isn’t time—”
“There is exactly as much time as it takes you to tell me plainly what has happened,” the pastor said with a firmness that brooked no argument, “so that I might actually help you find her, instead of watching you ride off half-blind into the dark chasing a feeling instead of a plan.”
Henry sank onto the edge of the nearest pew, his hands shaking as he pressed them against his knees, and told him. He told Pastor Luke everything.
He told him about Ruth’s real name, about Devil’s Hollow and the debt her father had tried to settle with her hand in marriage.
He told him about the train, about the woman named Nora who had traded away her own future for the one Ruth needed to survive.
He told him about the wedding that was, in the law’s cold accounting, no wedding at all.
Pastor Luke did not interrupt once. He sat very still through all of it, his hands folded in his lap, his expression unreadable in the lamplight.
Only when Henry finished, when the whole of it had finally been laid bare between them, did the old minister let out a long, slow breath. He removed his spectacles entirely, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “Nora Smith,” he said quietly, almost to himself.
“She lied to protect herself,” Henry said. “Not to deceive you, particularly. To survive.”
“I understand that,” Pastor Luke said. “I do not doubt for a moment what drove her to it. Lord knows I’ve heard worse reasons for far worse lies in this room.”
He was quiet for a moment, turning his spectacles over in his hands. “I wish she had come to me,” he continued. “But perhaps she forgot, as we all do from time to time, that this church has never once turned away a frightened soul for the crime of being frightened.”
He set his spectacles aside and looked up at Henry directly.
“I recall now—she came to me, weeks past, with a question dressed up as a hypothetical. Asked what became of a lie that had grown larger than the one who told it. I gave her Esther’s story, and told her silence becomes the greater danger, in time.
” He shook his head slowly, something like rueful admiration crossing his weathered face.
“I didn’t understand, until just now, quite how directly that lesson applied to her. ”
Pastor Luke studied Henry for a long moment and something in his gaze sharpened, turning from the matter of Ruth’s confession to the man sitting across from him. “And you, Henry? You’ve told me what she did. You haven’t yet told me what it did to you, hearing it.”
Henry was quiet a moment, staring down at his own hands. “It should have made me angry,” he admitted, finally. “For a while, I think it did. But…” His voice trailed off as he shook his head.
“Tell me,” Pastor Luke urged gently.
Henry shook his head. “After she told me, I was in shock I think. Then, I realized that it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that she had another name, that she wasn’t the woman I thought she was. Because I loved her, anyway.”
Pastor Luke waited.
“And it was realizing that,” Henry continued, “that left me frozen.”
“With fear?” Pastor Luke prompted.
Henry nodded. “As soon as I knew I loved her, I was paralyzed. So much so that I let her walk away from me.” In that moment, speaking the words out loud, Henry was suddenly frustrated with himself.
“I’ve spent three years telling myself silence was strength.
That a man carries his grief alone and calls it dignity. But I am a coward, Pastor.”
Pastor Luke said nothing for a moment, letting the words settle in the quiet of the sanctuary.
“I was a coward and now I might have lost the best thing to ever happen to me.”
“Trust in the lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths,” Pastor Luke quoted. “He has a plan for you, Henry.”
“Does he?” Henry challenged. “Because I haven’t had the time of day for Him in years. Why should I believe He will guide me now?”
The old pastor was silent for a long moment, studying him in the lamplight with the same patient attention Henry remembered from every conversation they’d ever had in this room.
“Henry,” he said, leaning forward and resting his forearms on his knees.
“Faith is not a thing that vanishes, whatever you might have believed these past three years. It weakens, the way any fire weakens when it’s left untended too long.
It burns low. It smokes and sputters and convinces a man it’s gone out entirely.
” He held Henry’s gaze steadily. “But a coal buried deep enough in the ash is rarely as dead as it looks. It only wants tending.”
“I don’t know how to tend it,” Henry said. “I haven’t the first idea where to begin.”
“You begin,” the pastor said, “the same way you begin anything worth doing—imperfectly, and afraid, and trusting that God will meet you exactly where you stand rather than where you think you ought to be first.”
He offered a faint, knowing smile. “This church still holds a place for you,” Pastor Luke said gently.
“So does God, whatever distance you’ve kept between yourself and Him these past years.
That much will still be true tomorrow, and the day after, and every day you choose to walk back through these doors. ”
He rose from the pew, reaching for his coat from the hook beside his study door. “But tonight, faith looks like getting up off this pew and finding that woman before Gideon Walker does. The rest can wait until morning.”
“You don’t have to come“ Henry urged.
“I’ll not sit comfortably by my fire tonight wondering if she’s safe,” he said. “Besides, two sets of eyes find a person faster than one, and having spread God’s word around this town and several others, I know this land considerably better than you do, Henry Foster.”
They went out together into the dark street, Henry leading Buck by the reins. Pastor Luke, who’d retrieved his own horse from behind the church, walked briskly beside him, the reins in one hand and a lamp in the other.
The town remained mostly shuttered, windows dark, the boardwalks empty, until, halfway down Main Street, they came upon old Silas Cobb making his rounds with the long-handled pole he used to light the street lamps each evening.
Most of them had already been lit and left to burn low against the dark.
“Silas.” Pastor Luke’s voice carried down the empty street. “Have you seen a young woman pass through this evening? Alone, on foot, chestnut hair, likely in some distress.”
The old lamplighter squinted at them both, working the question over slowly the way older men in small towns often did, unhurried even by clear urgency in another man’s voice.
“Might have,” he said finally. “Saw a woman go into the saloon a while back. Struck me odd. Decent women don’t usually go in there alone, ‘specially not at this hour. Didn’t think much more of it. ”
Henry’s stomach dropped straight through the boardwalk beneath his boots. “How long ago?” he asked quickly.
“Hour, maybe less.” Silas scratched at his gray stubble. “Can’t say for certain. I’ve had my rounds to mind.”
Henry was already moving before the old man finished speaking, Buck’s reins clutched tight in one fist as he half-ran, half-dragged the tired horse down the street toward the glow of the saloon. Pastor Luke hurried to keep pace beside him, his coat flapping loose in the night air.
The saloon doors swung open beneath Henry’s hand with the same force he’d used on the church door not twenty minutes before. He crossed to the bar in three long strides, ignoring the curious glances that turned his way.
“My wife,” he said. “Chestnut hair, blue dress, came in maybe an hour ago. Where is she?”
The bartender, a heavyset man with a rag still slung over one shoulder, looked Henry over with the caution of a man who had learned to read trouble walking through his door before it ever opened its mouth.
“She was here,” he said slowly. “Sat with Walker and his two men, back corner table. Didn’t look real happy about it, if I’m honest, but she went with him plain enough when they left. ”
“Left.” The word came out of Henry like something torn loose. “Left, when? Which direction?”
“Not fifteen minutes past. Rode out east, toward the county line, far as I could tell from the window.”
The bartender’s eyes flicked briefly toward Pastor Luke, then back to Henry, something almost like sympathy crossing his weathered face. “Whatever business you’ve got with Walker, mister, I’d think twice. Man doesn’t travel with the sort of company you argue with easy.”
Henry did not wait to hear the rest. He was already through the swinging doors and back out into the night, hauling himself up into Buck’s saddle. Pastor Luke was close behind, moving toward his own mount tied at the rail with considerably more urgency than his years usually allowed.
“Henry—” he called, swinging up with some difficulty, “wait, we should think—”
But Henry was no longer capable of waiting, and no longer entirely capable of thinking, at least rationally. Every part of him had narrowed down to a single, driving purpose, sharp and absolute as a blade.
He dug his heels into Buck’s flanks and the horse surged forward, out past the edge of town, onto the dark ribbon of road stretching east toward the county line.
And there, far ahead in the thin moonlight, he caught sight of them.
Three riders moving at an unhurried pace that suggested men who believed themselves entirely unwatched, entirely safe in the dark.
Henry’s heart slammed against his ribs so hard it nearly stole his breath.
It has to be them. He drove forward into the dark with Pastor Luke’s voice calling something behind him.
The wind tore it away before it ever reached his ears.
The only thought he had room for in the whole of his mind was closing the distance between himself and those riders.