Just finding Lana’s story? Read Part 4 here to catch up on the river crossing and the line shack upstream.
Last time, I had my fingers tangled in the wire on that line shack door, June Whitaker’s voice whispering through the boards, when I heard the click of a rifle hammer right behind my head. Then a voice that wasn’t Dale Pruitt’s said, “I told you to come alone, Lana.”
So many of you guessed. Some of you said Jesse set me up. Some of you said it was a woman. One of you said it was the deputy who never showed. Here is what really happened in that clearing.
The Voice Behind the Rifle
I didn’t turn around fast. Grandma used to say you never make sudden moves around a scared horse or a scared man, and I could hear in that voice that he was scared. It was shaking at the edges, the way mine does when I’m trying to sound tougher than I feel.
So I let go of the wire, held both hands out where he could see them, and turned my head an inch at a time.
He was standing at the edge of the trees, maybe twenty feet back. Ball cap pulled low, a feed store work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, boots still dusty from the hay barn. And the moment I saw his face, my stomach dropped right through the dirt.
“Travis?”
Travis Pruitt. The quiet kid from the feed store in town. The one who loaded fifty-pound bags of sweet feed into my truck every Saturday morning and always asked how Raven’s hoof was healing. The one who once told me, blushing, that he liked my hair better in the buns.
I had never once asked him his last name.
All those Saturdays. All those easy little conversations over the tailgate about the weather and the price of hay. And the whole time, he had known exactly who I was and exactly which barn I kept my horses in. I thought about the night the storm hit, the trailer at the end of my road, the way Willow had screamed. I wondered how long he had been watching.
What Travis Pruitt Wanted With a Gray Mare
“You weren’t supposed to come up here,” he said. The rifle was pointed somewhere around my boots now, not my head. That was something. “You were supposed to leave her by the trailer and go home.”
“Then why is June locked in a shack, Travis?”
He flinched like I’d slapped him. For a second, he looked about fifteen years old.
And then it all came out of him in a rush, the way things do when somebody has been carrying them alone for too long. His dad owed money to people in Oklahoma. Bad money. There was a buyer out there who wanted June’s mare, because Willow came from a bloodline that won everything on the ranch circuit back in the nineties, and her foals would be worth more than this whole valley. June had refused to sell for ten years. So Dale stopped asking.
“He said nobody would get hurt,” Travis whispered. “He said she’d be home by Sunday. He said it was just a horse.”
I looked at the boy holding that rifle, and I didn’t feel angry anymore. I felt sad for him. “Travis,” I said softly, “you know it was never just a horse.”
Willow Made the First Move
I didn’t plan what happened next. Willow did.
That gray mare had been standing behind me the whole time, still as a statue, head low. But when Travis took one step closer, she threw her head up, let out a scream that echoed off every tree in that clearing, and reared straight up on her hind legs between us.
I have ridden horses since I was four years old. I have never seen a mare do that to protect someone. She came down hard, planted her front feet, pinned her ears flat, and stared that boy down like he was a coyote at the edge of her pasture.
Travis stumbled backward and the rifle barrel dipped toward the ground. He didn’t raise it again. He just stood there, breathing hard, staring at her.
“She did that to my dad, too,” he said quietly. “The night he took June. She wouldn’t load. That’s why he needed you.”
I thought about Dale on the far bank, smiling that smile, telling me to bring her across. I thought about the chained trailer gate and how Willow had refused to even look at it.
That’s when I understood. They didn’t want me to deliver a mare. They needed the one person Willow had decided to trust.
June Was Alive Behind That Door
“Put it down, Travis,” I said. “Please. Help me get her out.”
For a long, long moment he didn’t move. Then he laid the rifle on a stump, walked past me without a word, pulled a pair of fencing pliers out of his back pocket, and cut the wire on that door with three quick snaps.
The door swung open, and the smell of dust and old coffee rolled out.
June Whitaker was sitting on a narrow cot against the back wall, a wool blanket around her shoulders. She was tiny, much smaller than she looked in that photograph on her kitchen table, with silver hair braided down her back and the sharpest blue eyes I have ever seen. Her wrists were red from the rope, but she was alive. She was alive.
She didn’t look at Travis. She didn’t look at me. She looked straight past both of us at that gray mare standing in the doorway, and she started to cry.
“There’s my good girl,” she said. “I knew you’d come.”
Willow walked right into that tiny shack, ducked her big head, and pressed her nose into June’s lap. I had to grab the doorframe. I’m not ashamed to tell you I cried too.
I knelt down and started working the last of the rope off June’s ankles. That’s when she grabbed my wrist with a grip like iron and pulled me close.
“Listen to me, honey,” she whispered, so low Travis couldn’t hear. “It was never about the mare. Dale doesn’t know that yet. It’s about what my husband buried under her stall.”
The White Horse Came Back Alone
I didn’t even have time to ask her what she meant.
Out in the trees, I heard hooves. Running hard, crashing through the brush, coming straight for the clearing. My heart jumped, because I knew that sound. Jesse. Finally.
I ran outside, already shouting his name, ready to tell him June was safe, ready to tell him he was late and I was going to make him pay for it with a week of mucking stalls. I ran outside just as Ghost burst out of the cottonwoods.
The big white gelding was lathered with sweat, eyes rolling, his reins snapped and dangling against his chest. He slid to a stop beside Willow, blowing hard, and turned in a tight, panicked circle.
His saddle was empty.
No Jesse. No hat. Just one stirrup swinging loose and a long scrape of red mud down his shoulder, like he had gone down somewhere back along that river.
Travis came out behind me and went pale. “That’s not good,” he breathed. “Lana, that’s not good. My dad went back down toward the crossing.”
And somewhere below us, through the trees, I saw headlights snap on. Two sets. Moving slowly up the old logging road toward the shack.
Travis squinted at them, and I watched every bit of color leave his face.
“That second truck,” he said. “That isn’t my dad’s.”
So now I’m asking you. What do you think June’s husband buried under that stall? And where is Jesse?
Part 6 is coming soon. Follow Reiterin on Facebook so you don’t miss what happened when those headlights reached the clearing.