Chapter 5
Serena looked toward the window, where ice scratched at the glass like claws. “They won’t be able to see the house until they’re forty feet out.”
“Neither can we see them,” Elias replied. “Unless we use the ground you built.”
He looked at her, and for the first time that night, a grim, razor-thin smile touched his lips.
“The guide rope.”
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Thirty minutes later, the blizzard reached its screaming zenith. The world outside the cabin was a roaring vacuum of zero visibility, where up and down ceased to exist and thirty seconds of bare skin meant gangrene.
Through the howling vortex, four figures moved like hunched shadows up the gradual incline from the creek.
Caleb Vance led them, wrapped in a buffalo-hide coat, a wool scarf pulled over his nose, his eyes squinting through ice-caked lashes. He held a revolver in a mittened hand, swearing with every labored breath as the wind threatened to rip him off his feet. Behind him, three men struggled through snowdrifts that reached past their waists, their rifles held under their coats to keep the firing pins from freezing shut.
“There!” one of the men yelled over the tempest, pointing toward a faint, blurry smudge of yellow light in the white wall ahead. “The cabin!”
Vance grunted, raising his weapon. “Surround the perimeter! If the girl runs, shoot the legs out from under her! If the Baird bastard draws iron, drop him in the yard!”
They pushed forward through a three-foot drift, stumbling toward the yellow glow.
Vance reached out blindly through the blinding swirl—and his glove hit a thick, taut hemp rope suspended three feet off the ground, vibrating like a bowstring in the wind.
“What the hell is this?” one of the gunmen shouted, clutching the rope to keep his balance against a sudden eighty-mile blast of wind.
“A guide line!” Vance yelled back, a cruel sneer twisting his frozen lips. “The fool strung a path straight from the barn to his front door! Follow it! It leads right to the porch!”
The four men clamped their gloved hands onto the heavy hemp, letting the rope guide them through the blinding whiteout. They moved single-file, heads down against the stinging needle-ice, confident they had the homestead cornered like sheep in a pen.
Ten yards. Twenty yards.
The rope suddenly made an abrupt, sharp ninety-degree turn toward the eastern darkness.
Vance frowned through the frost on his eyebrows. The cabin light was off to his left. Why did the guide line cut toward the open pasture?