Chapter 4
“You think you’re walking out into sixty-mile-an-hour winds to die in a snowdrift?” he asked.
“It keeps the children safe!” she cried, her voice cracking for the first time since she had walked into his life five months ago. “You told me on the first day: *if you have reason not to trust me, you leave before the heavy snow.* Well, the heavy snow is here, Elias. And I brought wolves to your door.”
Elias didn’t let go of the latch. He looked down at her hands—the hands that had nursed Elsie through lung fever hours ago, that had built the warming box that saved his best heifer’s calf, that had organized Martha’s cellar with meticulous reverence.
“I said if I had reason not to trust you,” Elias said, his voice dropping into an iron register that echoed off the rough timber walls. “A woman who steals bread is a thief. A woman who stands between orphans and a winter grave is kin. You don't run from wolves, Serena. Not on Black Juniper land.”
He turned to Hollis, who was gripping his bleeding arm by the stove.
“Beatrice,” Elias commanded.
The older woman didn’t hesitate. She handed Ethan to Serena, stepped forward, and pulled a clean linen towel from the shelf. “Get his coat off,” Beatrice ordered briskly, her high-society demeanor giving way to the steel of a pioneer matriarch. “Serena, there's carbolic acid and boiled strips in the tin box beneath Martha’s dry sink. Move.”
Within ten minutes, Hollis’s arm was cleaned, packed with pine salve, and bound tight. The bullet had only grazed the muscle, torn more by ice and saddle leather than lead. As Hollis drank a steaming mug of black chicory coffee, color slowly crept back into his hollow cheeks.
“They aren’t riding fast,” Hollis wheezed, leaning his head against the warm brick of the hearth. “They lost two horses at the washed-out creek bridge. They’re following the cattle trail along the ridge. They know your ranch is the only roof with smoke for eight miles. They’ll be here within the hour.”
Elias walked to the gun rack above the stone mantle. He pulled down the heavy Winchester .44-40, checked the lever action with a crisp, oily snap, and laid two boxes of cartridges on the table. Beside it, he set his father’s double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun.
“In this whiteout,” Elias said, calculating the terrain in his mind, “they won’t approach on horseback. They’ll tie the mounts in the leeward shelter of the cottonwood grove near the creek and come up the south path on foot, using the wind at their backs.”