buckskins that rattled with decorative beads. He was tall and thin, formed like a runner, with a narrow jaw and kind eyes. He was spectacularly tall, well over six and a half feet, and had slender fingers that were also noticeably long. A peace pipe was tied at his waist.
He lifted her onto the horse and spoke to her in a language she didn’t understand. And though she didn’t know the words, her soul heard them as the words spoken by Jesus to the paralytic at Bethesda: Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. Then the man slapped the animal’s rump, and the horse’s gentle sway rocked her back to dreams.
The horse was touched, fed, watered, and sheltered by several witnesses before it disappeared from the mining settlement, which made it difficult to dismiss Mathilde’s story entirely as a fever-induced hallucination. Still, there were theories about where the horse had really come from. It was wild, some said, in spite of its decorated mane. It was the lost and wandering property of a nearby tribe. It was offered by a Ute hunter who took pity on the injured woman and sent her home, expecting neither recognition nor compensation for his good deed.
It was this last theory that seemed the most reasonable to Mathilde’s husband, and it was supported by the eventual discovery of the campfire site where she’d spent her precarious days, two miles above the Burnt Rock settlement. There they found the shredded bloody petticoats she’d used for bandages, and a peace pipe made of willow.
The Ute tribes of the region were known as a peaceful people, and Mathilde’s husband wanted to show his gratitude to them with a gift. With Mathilde’s consent he withdrew from their stores the most valuable possession they owned: a fine leather saddle tooled with mountain flowers and overlaid with pure hand-hammered silver. The fenders, the skirt, the housing, and more were heavy with the precious metal. Mathilde had made the saddle for him as a wedding gift while they were still in Germany, in anticipation of their new life together in the Wild West.
He went with a fellow miner who knew the languages of the Utes, and the interpreter made a path for him. All of the nearby villages insisted that their horses and warriors were accounted for and knew no story of a white woman hovering between this world and the next.
One tribal elder, however, claimed to recognize the willow pipe when it was shown to him. He said that the man Wulff sought lived apart from the tribes and had come to the region with white missionaries years earlier. The elder didn’t know where the man could be found, but offered to accept the saddle until his next appearance. In exchange they provided Wulff with a horse, not knowing he no longer had one, and then they loaded the mule he’d borrowed from a neighbor with heavy bear furs and tightly woven baskets filled with food.
Mathilde never engaged in any debate about the believability of her story, and she never altered her account of the man and horse rising from the ashes like the mythical phoenix. She told the story once publicly, then never again, and her experience might have been forgotten in time if her grandson hadn’t taken interest in the crumbling journal written in her fading hand.
In the early 1920s, Jonathan Wulff came to Burnt Rock after a season abroad in Egypt, where he’d become caught up in the excitement surrounding Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The young archaeology student participated in little more than the grunt work associated with the great find, but that didn’t dampen his plans to pursue a career in antiquities. They were temporarily interrupted, however, when he fell from a ladder into an excavated tomb and broke his left leg, which subsequently became infected. As his condition worsened he was sent away to Paris so that grumblings about the pharaoh’s curse would have no reason to spread among his colleagues.
Though Jonathan improved in France, his full recovery was expected to take months. And so he chose to recuperate among the family that had enthusiastically funded his education and career with the profits of their successful mining operations.
During his stay in Burnt Rock he was gifted with his grandmother’s journal and the peace pipe that had remained in the family. His father thought that Jonathan would appreciate the romance of Mathilde’s tale, which by that time had devolved to the status