She Crossed a Blizzard to Save Her Brother from the Gallows. The Mountain Man Who Rescued Her Was the Secret the Hangman Feared Most.
Catherine Prescott knew she was going to die when she stopped feeling the cold.
That frightened her more than the wind.
More than the snow filling her tracks behind her.
More than the three armed men she had glimpsed through the trees two miles back.
Because her father had once told her that pain meant the body was still fighting.
Numbness meant it had begun to surrender.
Catherine staggered another step through the waist-deep Wyoming snow.
Then another.
Beneath her wool coat, strapped tightly against her ribs, a leather satchel seemed to weigh more than the mountains themselves.
Inside was a ledger.
A small, ugly brown book.
A book powerful men had already killed to keep secret.
A book containing payments to jurors, sheriffs, railroad officials, judges, and hired gunmen.
And among those pages was the proof that her older brother, Thomas Prescott, had not murdered a federal officer six years earlier.
Thomas had spent six years in the territorial prison insisting he was innocent.
Six years while Catherine begged attorneys to reopen the case.
Six years while witnesses disappeared, affidavits were withdrawn, and men who offered to help suddenly decided they had remembered things differently.
Now his appeals were exhausted.
In four days, at eight o’clock in the morning, Thomas Prescott would be hanged in South Pass City.
Unless Catherine reached him first.
“Four days,” she whispered through cracked lips.
The wind stole the words.
She clutched the satchel.
“You only need four days.”
Her horse had disappeared sometime before noon after panicking in the blizzard. Catherine had searched until she realized she could either look for the animal or keep walking.
She had chosen Thomas.
She always chose Thomas.
When their mother died, Thomas had been the one who learned to braid Catherine’s hair.
When their drunken father vanished into a Nevada mining camp, Thomas had worked fourteen hours a day at the telegraph office so Catherine could finish school.
When Catherine was twelve and had scarlet fever, Thomas had slept beside her bed for nine nights.
And when he had been dragged from their home in irons at twenty-eight years old, accused of murdering Federal Inspector Elias Mercer, Thomas had looked at his terrified sister and said only:
“Don’t let them teach you to hate the truth just because the truth is expensive.”
Catherine had never forgotten.
She wouldn’t now.
A branch cracked somewhere behind her.
Catherine froze.
The hunters.
She turned.
White.
Nothing but white.
Pines bent beneath snow.
Wind screamed through the branches.
Then she heard it.
A horse.
Far behind.
Catherine tried to hurry.
Her right leg gave out.
She crashed to her knees.
The impact barely hurt.
That terrified her.
“No.”
She pushed herself upright.
Her hands would not obey.
“No.”
Another step.
The world tilted.
Her vision narrowed.
Thomas appeared in her mind behind iron bars.
Not the thirty-four-year-old prisoner he had become.
The seventeen-year-old boy who had once carried her six miles after she broke her ankle.
Catherine smiled weakly.
“I’m trying.”
Her knees folded.
She fell face-first into the snow.
For several seconds she lay there listening to the strange silence inside her head.
Then something moved through the storm.
Something huge.
