“They Mocked A Mountain Man For Asking For A Wife — Then A Woman’s Question Shut The Whole Town Up”

Chapter 9

The ascent was brutal. The wind tore at their heavy coats, and the fresh snow made the steep rock face treacherously slick. Behind them, through the howling gusts, they could hear the faint, angry shouts of Elias Vane and his remaining riders. They had discovered the tunnel exit and were foolishly pursuing them up the mountain — blinded by their own arrogance and a desperate need to silence the only witnesses to their crimes.

Gideon climbed like a man made of the mountain itself, and Cora matched him stride for stride, her lungs burning in the thin air, her fingers numb inside her gloves. She did not look down. She did not think about the cabin, or the comb lost somewhere in the flames, or the life they had built that now lay in smoking ruin. She put one foot in front of the other and followed the broad back of the man ahead of her, the man who had promised to never let anything harm her.

They climbed higher into the frozen white void, where the world of men ended and the reign of ice began.

And then Cora’s foot slipped on a patch of hidden black ice.

She went down hard, sliding backward, her fingers clawing desperately at the cold rock as she careened toward a sheer three-hundred-foot drop.

“GIDEON!”

His name tore from her throat, swallowed by the wind.

Gideon lunged, throwing his body across the slick rock, his muscles straining to the absolute limit. He caught her wrist just in time — his grip like iron — and hauled her up against his chest with a desperate grunt. For one terrifying second he held her there, his heart hammering against her back, his breath ragged in her ear.

Then he pulled her behind a massive granite boulder just as the blizzard hit them with full force, reducing visibility to mere feet.

The storm raged around them like a howling monster of ice and wind, erasing the distinction between earth and sky. The snow fell in dense, suffocating sheets, accumulating rapidly on the steep limestone slopes. It was a landscape defined by its instability — a place where a single loud sound could trigger a catastrophe.

Through the whiteout, a solitary figure emerged, stumbling up the steep, icy chute.

It was Elias Vane.

He was dragging his rifle, his expensive beaver fur coat caked with heavy snow, his face twisted into a mask of obsessive, freezing rage. He was alone. His hired riders had either lost their footing on the treacherous cliffs or turned back, terrified of the storm. But Vane was driven by a mad, desperate need to destroy the mountain man who had defied him — a final gasp of a dying empire. He could not accept that there was something on this earth he could not buy or conquer.

“Creed!” Vane screamed into the roaring wind, his voice thin and cracking with exhaustion. “You can’t hide from me! I own this territory! You’re nothing but a dead man!”

Gideon stepped out from behind the boulder, standing tall on a high granite ridge that overlooked the narrow avalanche chute. He looked down at the man who had caused so much misery — the man who had worked Cora’s husband to death, who had starved a widow for sport, who had murdered his own brother Abel in a rigged land grab and then laughed about it over whiskey. The man who had tried to burn them alive in their own home.

Gideon did not aim his rifle at Elias Vane.

Instead, he raised the barrel high above Vane’s head — pointing directly at the center of a massive, unstable cornice of frozen snow and blue ice that clung precariously to the high peak of the Devil’s Fang.

“I don’t have to hide from you, Vane.” Gideon’s voice boomed down the canyon, amplified by the natural rock. “You don’t belong on this mountain. And the mountain doesn’t forgive men like you.”

Vane raised his rifle, his frozen fingers struggling to find the trigger in the biting cold.

Gideon fired first.

The sharp crack of the Winchester echoed like a clap of thunder off the granite walls. The bullet struck the very center of the overhanging ice shelf.

For a single, terrible moment, there was a breathless silence.

Then a loud, deep groan vibrated through the very stone beneath their feet.

Elias Vane looked up. His eyes widened in pure, paralyzing terror as he realized what had happened.

A massive, roaring wall of white death — thousands of tons of snow, ice, and pulverized rock — detonated from the peak, cascading down the narrows with the force of a runaway freight train. Vane turned to run, but his boots slipped on the slick ice.

There was no escaping the mountain’s final, poetic justice.

The roaring avalanche swallowed him whole — a blinding white tide that swept his body down into the deepest, darkest canyon, burying him beneath forty feet of impenetrable, freezing ice. He was gone in an instant, his greed and cruelty preserved in a cold, eternal tomb.

Gideon and Cora stood together on the safe, protected ridge behind the massive boulder, holding onto each other as the earth shook violently beneath their feet. Then, slowly, the terrifying roar of the slide faded into the distance.

The blizzard began to break. The dark clouds parted, and a fragile shaft of golden afternoon sunlight pierced the sky, illuminating the reshaped, pristine white valley below.

The monsters of their pasts were gone — buried forever beneath the snow.