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

Chapter 6

Simon left two hours before sunrise with his pockets full of dynamite and his face blackened with pine pitch.

Elena watched him disappear into the trees from the front window and then turned to the task of converting the cabin into a defensive position. She barred the shutters and cut firing loopholes into the lower corners of the east and west windows with a wood chisel, working by firelight with a concentration that felt almost meditative. She dragged the ammunition boxes to positions behind the heaviest timber walls. She checked the Sharps twice, loaded it, confirmed the percussion cap was seated correctly, and took her position at the eastern window.

Then she waited.

The waiting was the worst of it. The darkness outside was complete and the cold that seeped through the shuttered windows was the cold of deep mountain winter, a living, pressing thing. Gable breathed shallowly on the floor behind her. The fire burned.

Dawn came not with light but with a gradual reduction of darkness, the black softening to bruised purple and then to a dim, fog-heavy grey. The frozen lake threw a ghostly luminescence into the valley. She could see perhaps forty yards clearly. Beyond that was mist.

She heard them before she saw them. Not voices — they were professionals, and professionals do not talk on approach. She heard the sound of many boots compressing snow in a way that has a different rhythm than one pair, the specific collective sound of coordinated movement. Then the shapes emerged from the mist: a loose skirmish line of men in buffalo coats, rifles held across their bodies, moving with the organized confidence of a force that expects to be numerically overwhelming.

At the center of the line: Caleb McGra. Fur coat, broad-brimmed hat, the posture of a man who has never approached a problem he could not buy or kill his way through.

Beside him: One-Eyed Jack Callahan. She had heard the name spoken with a specific kind of fear in Bitter Creek, the kind reserved for men who had made a career of lethal efficiency.

They were fifty yards from the tree line when the snow exploded.

The sound reached her a fraction of a second after the visual — a detonation that punched the air out of the valley and sent a column of snow and earth and shattered rock skyward in a white-grey pillar. Three men were thrown. Elena saw them tumbling, saw the snow where they landed, saw the stillness that followed. Before the echo had finished rolling off the granite cliffs, a second explosion tore open the left flank of the line, and Simon’s revolvers began their rhythmic, devastating work from somewhere high in the canopy.

The mercenaries were firing into trees. Firing at sound and shadow, their shots splintering ancient pines while Simon relocated with each discharge, invisible and methodical, a man applying engineering principles to the problem of position and angle and rate of fire.

Elena watched through her loophole and did not fire. Not yet. She was waiting.

She saw the mercenary break from the chaos — a young man, broad-shouldered, running low and fast toward the blind side of the cabin, a lit torch in his right hand. He was thirty yards away, then twenty.

The bottom of the exhale. When everything goes still.

She pressed her cheek to the cold iron receiver. She found him in the sights. She breathed out.

She squeezed.

The Sharps spoke with the voice of something geological. The recoil drove her backward a half-step. When she found the loophole again, the torch was out in a snowbank and the man was not moving.

“Good shot.” Gable’s voice behind her, barely audible, torn with pain. She did not look away from the window.

Outside, McGra had reorganized. She could hear him bellowing through the gunsmoke and the fog, the arrogance still present, still audible, but now edged with something else. “Forget the trees! Rush the cabin!” Callahan rallied the remaining men, and the pack of them came through the knee-deep snow in a concentrated mass, abandoning tactical spacing for the blunt mathematics of overwhelming force.

Simon dropped from the canopy directly into their path.

He hit the snow at a run and collided with Callahan with the impact of a collision between two objects that both believed they were the larger force. They went down together in the churned snow, a brutal close-quarters exchange that had no elegance to it, only the grim application of strength and leverage and the willingness to absorb damage in order to deliver it. Callahan’s Bowie knife opened a gash along Simon’s thigh. Simon’s hunting knife found its answer.

Five men peeled away from the melee and hit the cabin door.

The oak held for two impacts. On the third, the iron hinges tore free and the door came in.

Elena had already abandoned the window. She was standing in the center of the room with the Colt Navy revolver held in both hands, her feet shouldered-width apart, the way Simon had showed her when they practiced in the evenings with an unloaded weapon.

The first man through the door was met by Thomas Gable, sitting up from the floor with the last oxygen of his diminishing life, firing both barrels of the shotgun from a prone position. The blast was enormous in the confined space. The man went backward out the door.

The return fire caught Gable in the chest. Elena heard the sound it made. She did not allow herself to process it.

Two men were in the room. Rifles coming up.

She fired three times.

The cabin filled with gunsmoke so thick she could not see. She stood in it and listened. When the smoke began to clear in the draft from the shattered doorway, she looked at what she had done and noted it, factually and without flinching, and then she moved.