“No,” Gideon said softly. “Too slow. Get behind the root cellar door in the floor.”
“Gideon—”
“Go!” he hissed.
She scrambled off the cot, dropped the heavy oak latch of the cellar floor, and pulled the braided rug over it just as the front door of the cabin exploded inward.
Splintered wood and flying iron shards filled the room as three armed men breached the threshold. They were heavily bundled in winter gear, their faces half-hidden by wool scarves and fur caps, but the wicked sheen of Remington revolvers in their gloved hands left no doubt of their profession.
“Well, well, well,” drawled the lead man, a broad-shouldered brute with a jagged scar running down his cheek and cold, dead eyes. He spat a stream of dark tobacco juice onto Gideon’s clean floorboards. “Looks like the mountain rat has company. Where is she, old man?”
Gideon stood slowly by the hearth, resting one hand casually near the heavy iron poker. “Ain’t nobody here besides me and my ghosts. You boys are lost. Leadville is fifty miles south.”
The leader chuckled, a dry, humorless sound, and stepped further into the room, his boots tracking slush across the planks. He gestured to the two younger thugs flanking him, who immediately fanned out, sweeping the small cabin with their gun barrels.
“Don’t play the fool with us, Hayes,” the scarred man sneered, stepping closer. “We tracked the girl’s footprints right to your ridge before the avalanche wiped out the lower trail. She’s got something of ours. A little black book. And you’re standing right in the middle of a very expensive payroll.”
“You must be mistaken,” Gideon said smoothly, his posture relaxed, though every muscle in his frame was coiled like a spring. “I live out here alone. I ain’t seen a living soul in months.”
The leader’s eyes narrowed. He looked past Gideon toward the cot, spotting the discarded oilskin wrap sitting on the table. A cruel, predatory smile spread across his face. He walked over, picked up the empty wrapping, and rubbed the fabric between his fingers.
“She was here,” the leader whispered, his voice dropping an octave as he turned back to face Gideon. “And she left her bedding warm. You’re protecting a dead woman, Hayes. Because the second I find her, I’m putting a lead ball through both of your heads and calling it a bandit raid.”
The thug on the left laughed, raising his pistol to level it directly at Gideon’s chest. “Let’s gut him now, boss. Saves us the trouble of digging a second hole.”
“Wait,” the leader commanded, holding up a gloved hand. He walked slowly toward Gideon, stopping just two paces away. The smell of cheap whiskey and frozen sweat rolled off him. “One last chance, old man. Where’s the ledger?”
Gideon looked the killer dead in the eye. A strange, slow smile touched the corners of Gideon’s mouth—not a smile of fear, but of profound, heavy resignation.
“You know,” Gideon said softly, his voice carrying an eerie calm, “you boys made one critical mistake when you took that railway contract.”
The leader frowned, tilting his head. “What are you talking about?”
“You forgot to check the passenger manifest for survivors who weren’t on the train,” Gideon said.
Before the leader could process the words, Gideon kicked the heavy iron cast-iron skillet off the hearth with his boot, sending it crashing into the shins of the nearest gunman. As the thug stumbled, cursing, Gideon lunged forward, his hand snapping out to grab the barrel of the lead killer’s Remington, shoving it upward just as it roared, blasting a hole through the cabin rafters.
Chaos erupted in the confined space.
The second gunman fired wildly, a bullet clipping Gideon’s shoulder and spraying hot blood across the stone fireplace. Gideon didn’t flinch. With terrifying strength, he slammed the lead killer’s head into the heavy pine log wall, dropping him instantly with a sickening crack.
The remaining thug swung his revolver toward Gideon’s back, shouting an oath.
*Bang.*
A sharp, deafening report echoed from the floorboards.
The gunman’s eyes widened in utter disbelief as a bullet punched straight through his chest, spinning him around before he collapsed lifelessly into the snow near the broken doorway.
Silence rushed back into the cabin, thick and suffocating, broken only by the crackle of the woodstove and the ragged breathing of the two survivors.
Slowly, the braided rug shifted.
Clara pushed open the root cellar door, the rusted revolver gripped tightly in her shaking hands, smoke still curling from its barrel. She stared down at the dead men sprawled across the floor, then looked up at Gideon, who was pressing a bloody hand against his torn shoulder, his breath coming in shallow gasps.
“Gideon…” she breathed, dropping to her knees beside him and tearing a strip of fabric from her hem to bind his wound. “You could have stayed out of this. You didn’t even know me.”
“I told you,” Gideon grunted, wincing as she pulled the knot tight. “I don’t like company… but I hate murderers even more.”
He looked down at the dead leader lying face-up near the hearth. As the man’s fur cap had slipped off during the scuffle, the harsh firelight illuminated a deep, jagged scar cutting across his scalp—a mark Gideon had studied every single day in his nightmares for the past ten years.
Clara noticed the strange look frozen on Gideon’s face. She paused, her hands hovering over his bleeding shoulder. “Gideon? What is it? Do you know him?”
Gideon slowly raised his head, his eyes dark, filled with a sudden, devastating storm of buried grief and revelation.
“I didn’t just stumble on your tracks by accident, Clara,” Gideon whispered, his voice trembling for the first time. “Ten years ago, before I came to these mountains to rot away in exile, I was the lead investigator for the Colorado State Railroad Commission. That man on the floor? He’s the enforcer who framed me for a train wreck I tried to stop, branding me a fugitive and destroying my entire life while the real killers walked free.”
Clara stared at him, the color draining from her face as the impossible puzzle pieces finally clicked together with horrifying clarity. “You… you were the man they blamed for the Leadville disaster.”
“And you,” Gideon said softly, looking down at the ledger in her hands, “weren’t just hiding from the company men by pure coincidence. Your father wasn’t just an accountant, Clara… he was the man who signed my name to the forged safety reports that sent me running for the high peaks.”
The silence in the cabin grew heavier than the snow outside, a crushing weight of shared history, betrayed trust, and bloody vengeance finally coming home to roost. Clara’s breath caught in her throat, the revolver slipping from her numb fingers to clatter against the floorboards. She looked from the dead men at her feet to the scarred, weary mountain man who had carried her through the blizzard, realizing with a jolt of pure terror that the monster she had been running from all winter was standing right beside the man who had just saved her life.
Gideon looked down at her wide, terrified eyes, the blood dripping slowly from his fingers onto the floor. Slowly, deliberately, he reached down, picked up the heavy leather ledger from the table, and tossed it straight into the roaring flames of the woodstove.
As the dry paper caught and began to curl into black ash, devouring the last remaining evidence of their shared past, Gideon reached out and took her trembling hand in his calloused grip.
“The storm’s clearing, little bird,” Gideon murmured, his voice steady as the cabin filled with the bright, blinding light of a new mountain dawn. “Let’s see who’s left to come looking for us.”