Chapter 7
The kitchen door opened ten yards away.
Serena stepped onto the leeward porch, holding a lit hurricane lantern high above her head. The yellow beam cut through the storm, illuminating her face—pale, determined, and utterly unafraid. In her other hand, she held the oilcloth-wrapped packet containing Clara’s journals and the forged territorial surveys.
Beside her stood Beatrice Crowell, holding Elias’s Winchester rifle with the steady, calm posture of a woman whose father had fought at Shiloh.
“You’re finished, Vance,” Serena called out, her voice ringing clear over the subsiding gusts. “The duplicate maps aren't in Helena. My attorney sent them to the Territorial Governor and the United States Marshal three weeks ago from the stage stop in Bozeman. The warrant was signed before this storm even hit the ridge.”
Vance’s face contorted into an ugly, desperate snarl. Realizing his entire fraudulent empire had crumbled, he raised his Colt revolver toward Serena’s chest.
“I’ll burn you first—!”
*CRACK.*
A single rifle shot cracked from the porch.
Beatrice didn’t even blink as the lever clicked back in her hands.
The bullet struck the frozen cylinder of Vance’s revolver, shattering the metal and tearing the weapon from his shattered fingers. Vance wailed in agony, clutching his bleeding, broken hand to his buffalo coat and collapsing into the snow.
Elias stepped forward, his heavy boots crunching through the drifts, and planted the toe of his boot firmly against Vance’s chest, pinning him into the ice.
“Down in the cellar pit,” Elias said, gesturing with the shotgun toward the two groaning men trapped ten feet below the stone rim. “Crawl down there with your boys and stay until morning. If you try to climb out before sunrise, you freeze. If you stay down, the snow will keep you alive until the Marshal rides through with the wagon.”
Vance looked up into Elias’s gray, merciless eyes, then toward the porch where Beatrice stood guard with the smoking rifle and Serena held the light. Defeated, broken, and shivering violently, the wealthy tyrant had no choice. He dragged himself across the drift and tumbled into the root cellar with his shattered men.
Elias dragged a heavy cedar timber over the stone trapdoor, dropped three fifty-pound sacks of dry salt on top to weigh it down, and turned back toward the house.
---
By morning, the miracle happened.
The wind died completely. The sky cleared into a brilliant, crystal-clear sapphire blue, the sun reflecting off an ocean of immaculate white that stretched unbroken toward the mountains. The pine trees hung heavy with glittering diamonds of frost, and the smoke from Black Juniper’s stone chimney rose straight up into the still, crisp mountain air.