They Shamed Her for Carrying Another Man’s Child—Then the Feared Mountain Man Stood and Claimed It

Chapter 5

For one frozen second, nobody moved.

Then Morgan roared.

“RUN!”

The mountain answered with a sound like the sky splitting open. Snow exploded from the ridge. Pine trees vanished beneath an advancing white wall taller than the cabin itself. Horses screamed and bolted.

“Inside!” Silas shouted. “Everybody inside!”

Morgan grabbed Abigail around the waist and threw her toward the door. “The tunnel! There’s a trapdoor under the rug beside the stove!”

Billy tried to run downhill.

Morgan caught the back of his coat. “You too.”

“Let go!”

“You know another way out of this?”

Billy stopped struggling.

Within seconds, eleven people crowded into the cabin — Abigail, Morgan, the reverend, Billy, Elias Crowe, Silas, and the remaining riders. The walls shuddered. Cups fell from shelves. The roar became unbearable, a wall of sound pressing down on the roof.

Morgan tore back the rug and wrenched open the trapdoor.

“Abigail first.”

She stared into the black square of the floor.

“Morgan—”

“Go!”

She climbed down. Her father followed. One by one, the others dropped through.

Morgan stayed above.

Silas shouted from below. “Montgomery!”

Morgan looked around the cabin one last time.

The table. The iron stove. The bed Abigail had slept in. And beneath a folded blanket in the corner, the small wooden cradle he had carved during the long winter nights — half finished, hidden away because he had been embarrassed for her to see it.

He heard wood cracking outside.

Morgan dropped through the opening and pulled the trapdoor shut over his head.

Three seconds later, the avalanche hit.

The earth convulsed like a dying animal. Dust exploded down the tunnel. Something enormous crashed overhead, and the darkness became absolute.

Abigail screamed.

Morgan threw himself over her, shielding her body with his own.

For a long time there was only breathing — her own, his, men coughing in the black, someone praying in a voice she didn’t recognize.

Then Billy laughed. A broken, hysterical sound.

“My father will bury us all.”

Morgan’s voice came out of the dark. “Not if you keep talking.”

The laugh stopped.

They crawled on their hands and knees through a tunnel never built for eleven bodies. Behind them, the cabin groaned and collapsed under tons of snow. Ahead, finally, a faint grey light appeared.

Morgan pushed open the hidden exit behind the woodpile. Snow had half-buried it, but not completely. He dug upward with bare hands until cold air rushed in.

One by one, they emerged.

The cabin was gone.

Where it had stood was now a vast broken field of snow, splintered timber, and shattered trees.

Abigail stared.

Her blankets. Her books. The cup Morgan always filled with fresh water each morning. The cradle.

Morgan stood beside her, expression unreadable.

But Abigail knew him now. She knew that cabin had been more than shelter. It had been the only home he had trusted since childhood.

She slipped her hand into his.

He looked down at her.

“You all right?”

“No.”

He nodded. “Me neither.”

It was the closest Morgan Montgomery had ever come to admitting heartbreak.

Then Silas shouted.

“Riders!”

Everyone turned.

Men were coming up the valley from below. More than twenty. At their center rode a heavyset, grey-bearded man with a smile that never reached his eyes.

Charles Hastings.

Billy’s father.

The mayor of Bitter Creek.