Her Parents Sold Her to a Feared Mountain Man — Then He Returned With a Promise No One Expected
Callaway’s eyes went to the granite shelf. He was calculating range, angle, implication — coming to exactly the conclusion she needed. Then the Sharps spoke, a boulder a hundred yards to the right exploding in stone chips, a warning close enough to mean it and far enough to mean he had range to spare. One of Callaway’s men bolted for the treeline without waiting for orders. Callaway looked at her window a long moment, then turned his horse and followed, unhurried, in the particular way of a man determined to look like he was leaving by choice.
“They’ll be back,” Evelyn said when Silas came down off the ridge. “With more men.”
“Yes.” He set the Sharps on the table. “We can’t hold this position indefinitely. We need to think about where we make the stand.”
They rode north before dawn the next morning, packing only what mattered — ammunition, food, medical supplies, the two rifles, the sparrow in her coat pocket, the only unnecessary thing she carried. The trail climbed above the treeline by first light, along a high ridge toward a place Silas had marked on his hand-drawn map: the Crown of the Sky, a hidden alpine valley two days north, and along the way, a narrow gorge he called Devil’s Anvil, where a forty-foot overhang of compacted winter snowpack had been slowly failing on rotten granite all season.
“One shot at the right place on that cliff face,” he said, studying the map with her, shoulders touching over the lamp. “The vibration goes straight up. The snow’s already failing. It just needs the final argument.” He traced the gorge with one finger — the narrowest point, the boulders where she’d take cover, the west cliff where he’d climb for the shot. “I’ll need eyes on the gorge floor. I can’t see it from the ridge — wrong angle. Fire too early and the snow falls in front of them. Too late, and it falls behind, and we’ve made things worse.”
“Two shots from the Winchester, fast, one after the other,” she said. “The signal.”
“Don’t wait too long. Once they’re in the gorge and someone recognizes what that overhang means, they may try to pull back.”
“You’ve been thinking about this since last night.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been thinking about killing men.”
He didn’t look away. “I’ve been thinking about keeping you alive. And yes, that’s what it means.”
