The stock was all gone. He went to see if he could round up some strays - his or anyone else's, but he didn't come back.
After a couple of weeks she figured he was gone for good. Fell off his horse. Got shot. Or just kept riding. One thing she knew - he wasn't coming back.
She stood in the cabin door and shook out the quilt - snapped off the dust that blew in all day all night and coated everything with its own drab patina. The quilt whipped in front of her in the wind. She folded it across her arm and looked out across the valley. There he was again. What did he want up there in the rocks? He must know she was alone.
For the last time she swept the dirt floor and wiped the dust from the stove she'd brought all the way from Pike County all those years ago. In the morning she baked the last flour into bread and she boiled up strong coffee and she drank it all down. Wrapped in her quilt against the morning chill and armed with her buffalo gun she headed north to the mountain. Beyond the mountain was the east west trail. Couldn't be far.
Her shoes didn't last the day. She thought of going back to the cabin, but she knew that by now they would have been there. The stove. Her blue willow plate. The dress she was married in looking better on some young squaw than it ever looked on her. The second night her long dead children called to her in the wind - and dogs' barking mingled with their cries. She stuck her fingers in her ears but she could not drive them out.
Although the mountain looked no closer she could look down on the valley now. She ripped at the quilt and wrapped her feet in shredded patches, but the soft silk, the tender embroidery could not last long against the harsh ground.
Patches of snow and handfuls of lichens clawed from the rocks sustained her.
She climbed on, cursing out loud all gods, all devils, all men. Strange creatures accompanied her now. They whispered secrets she could not fathom, sang songs she did not hear. When she fell they pulled her up and led her on, their dark shapes invisible yet seen. Her world became darkness.
On the eighth day she awoke to find herself in sagebrush again. Her feet cut to the bone, her clothes in tatters. Quilt and gun long gone. But she was not alone.
He crouched quite close to her. Thinner than she. Eyes puffed and running pus. He extends a hand to touch her cheekbone. His fingers are hot. He is burning with fever. She puts up a hand to touch his, but he is gone.
``Its you,'' she said. Her hand touches her cheekbone.
``It was him,'' she said. The watcher in the rocks.
Snot nosed children picking flowers found her and led her back to their wagon. Grudgingly she was carried to the next trading post. She stayed there a few years living on hand outs, then slipped away to who knows where.
They named a mountain after her though. They called it Crazy Woman.