Chapter 6
Before he could shout a warning, the ground beneath his lead man’s boots simply ceased to exist.
A muffled shriek cut through the blizzard as the front gunman stepped out into empty air. The guide rope had not been anchored to the porch.
Serena had moved the severed line during the lulls between the gale’s gusts, securing the far end not to the woodshed, but to the rim of the abandoned stone root cellar on the eastern slope—a ten-foot pit lined with jagged fieldstones and four feet of loose, freezing drift snow.
The first man plummeted like a stone, his rifle firing uselessly into the sky with a dull *thump*.
The second man, holding the rope behind him, was yanked violently forward by his partner’s falling weight. He lost his footing on the ice-glazed rim, skidding on his belly and tumbling headfirst into the pit with a sickening crack of timber and bone.
“Trap!” Vance screamed, letting go of the hemp line and scrambling backward on his hands and knees into the snowdrifts. “Get back! Get back to the timber!”
The remaining henchman turned to run blindly into the storm, but the moment he broke away from the rope, the whiteout swallowed him entirely. He took three panicked steps in the roaring gloom, completely disoriented, unable to tell north from south.
*BOOM.*
The deafening roar of a ten-gauge shotgun ripped through the blizzard, muzzle flash blooming like an orange sun just twenty paces away.
A cloud of heavy buckshot shredded the snowdrifts at the henchman’s feet, kicking up a blinding curtain of ice. The man shrieked, dropped his Winchester into a snowbank, and threw his hands over his head, sinking into the freezing drift like a beaten dog.
“Step back or the next one takes your head off!” Elias’s voice cut through the wind, amplified by the hollow fury of the storm.
Elias stepped out from behind the reinforced shelter of the hay rick, looking like a vengeful specter of winter. He was tied securely to the true cabin line by a thick leather harness, anchored safely to the heavy logs of the main house. In his hands, the ten-gauge was leveled straight at Caleb Vance, who lay sprawled in the snow, his revolver shaking in his numb, frozen fingers.
“Baird!” Vance screamed, spitting ice and blood from his split lips. “You don't know what you're doing! That girl is a common criminal! Turn her over to me and I'll give you five hundred dollars in gold! Enough to buy out this whole valley!”