"Why Are You Hiding Under Our Wagon?" Mountain Men Asked — She Wept: "I Had Nowhere Else to Pray"

The wagon stands three feet off the ground on oak blocks propped in the pewtor light before dawn. From the wet red lom beneath it, a pair of small women's boots protrudes. Behind them, the Boston mountains climb into a sky the color of unpolished pewtor. Cedar timber and limestone bluffs. A cabin low against the ridge. Thin smoke rising

from a stone chimney. A porch. A man steps off it had already in his hand and stops midstride. His breath goes out in a white plume. Somewhere under the axle, iron turns on iron. A long patient grinding. The sound of a nut being turned by someone who does not intend to stop turning it. Two more men come

around the barn. An axe, a coffee pot, three shadows closing on the wagon in a slow arc. She slides out. soot on her temple, a worn leather Bible pinned to her breast, and in her hand a cracked spindle stamped with a mark none of them should have lived to see again. She had

nowhere else to pray. That was the sentence that would follow her into the rest of her life. But at the moment she said it, she was lying on her back in the wet red lom under a stranger's freight wagon with an antique iron wrench in her right hand and a worn leather pocket Bible pinned to her

breast by the crook of her left arm. and three enormous mountain men were standing over her in the pewtor light of an October dawn. The cold came down off the Boston Mountains that morning, the way it always did in the high country. Not all at once, quietly, the way a hand settles on a tired shoulder. It slid

down through the cedar timber and along the limestone bluffs, over the steep creek beds where the water ran clear and bitter as gunmetal, and it laid a gray breath across the red lom of the Northrup yard. Somewhere far below in a hollow, no eye could see a rooster gave one horse cry, and then thought better of it. Emory