“I’ll Take Her!” – The Mountain Man’s Choice Shocked the Entire West

Chapter 5

The rider came on the longest night of the year.

Elena heard the horse first — a labored, staggering sound in the tree line, wrong in the way that exhausted animals sound wrong. Simon was out of his chair and at the door with his rifle before she registered what she was hearing. They stood on the porch in the freezing dark, breath pluming in the lamplight she held forward, and listened to the sound draw closer and collapse.

A horse. A man falling from it into the snow.

Simon had the rifle leveled at the prone figure by the time Elena reached them with the lantern. She brought the light down and recognition hit her like cold water.

Thomas Gable lay face down in the snow, his deputy’s badge visible through a torn coat, his lips blue and his fingers blackened with the early stages of frostbite. The right side of his coat was dark with frozen blood.

They carried him inside. Elena stripped away the outer layers and found the wound — a rifle ball in the ribs, the entry clean but the surrounding tissue already showing the gray-blue pallor of deep-cold damage. She packed it and compressed it and kept her hands steady through an act of will she did not have time to examine.

Simon crouched over the semi-conscious man. “Gable. Who shot you?”

The deputy’s eyes were glassy and unfocused, skating between the fire and some middle distance. “McGra’s men,” he wheezed. The sound was wet. “He tore apart your father’s office, Miss Blake.” His eyes found Elena. “Found a hidden ledger. He knows the badlands claim is the key to the gold. He knows what Parker paid for you was just the beginning of what he stands to lose.” A cough. A pause while the room waited. “One-Eyed Jack Callahan. He’s leading twenty men. Hired guns from Cheyenne, Pinkertons, hard men.” Another pause, shorter. “They’ll be here by dawn. McGra himself is riding with them.”

The fire crackled. Elena pressed the compress tighter against his ribs.

“Why did you come?” she asked. “Thomas. You work for McGra.”

Tears ran from the corners of the deputy’s eyes, pooling in the hollows of his temples. “I looked the other way when he bought your father’s notes. I stood in that saloon and watched him put you on that platform.” His voice fractured and steadied. “But when I heard him give the order — kill Parker, make the girl look like an exposure death — I couldn’t make myself be a coward one more time.” He swallowed. “They caught me at the lower pass.”

Simon stood. His face had completed its transition into the expression she thought of as the siege face — not angry, not afraid, but stripped to a pure, cold functionality.

“Twenty men,” he said.

“Hard ones,” Gable confirmed, his strength guttering.

Simon turned to the window. Outside, the valley was absolute darkness, the kind of dark that exists only above the treeline in winter, without electric light or the orange smear of a distant town to soften it. Twenty armed mercenaries. One mountain man. One woman who had been shooting for five weeks.

“We run,” Elena said. Her voice was level. She was proud of that. “Higher up the ridge, into the upper crags. They can’t follow us there.”

“In the dark, in deep drifts, the horses will break their legs before we clear the treeline.” Simon turned back from the window. “In the open, they’ll run us down inside an hour.” He crossed to the heavy oak chest at the foot of his bed and threw back the lid. Inside: brass cartridges by the box, two Colt Navy revolvers, and — her eyes settled on it with a specific attention — a cache of mining dynamite in uniform wax-coated sticks, and coiled fuse. “They think they’re coming after a hermit.” He picked up a revolver and turned it once in his palm before he tossed it to her — not gently, but accurately, trusting her to catch it. She did. “They’ve forgotten I’m an engineer.”

He laid out the valley in his head the way she had seen him do with topographic maps — reading it, identifying its logic, converting its features into tactical geometry. The tree line. The granite cliff. The frozen lake, which would not support a horse. The single approach trail, steep and narrow, funneling twenty men into a corridor.

He talked for ten minutes. She listened and did not interrupt.

When he finished, Elena looked at the revolver in her hands. She looked at Thomas Gable on the floor, unconscious now, a loaded shotgun placed across his chest by his own insistence before he lost consciousness. She looked at Simon.

The woman who had stood on a shipping crate in the Golden Spur Saloon, pale and shaking and trying very hard not to show it, was not present in this room. Someone else was standing in this cabin, wearing her face.

“Let them come,” she said.