Caleb followed her gaze.
He had lived long enough in the mountains to respect instinct.
He walked to the door.
Opened it.
Moonlight silvered the snow.
Everything looked untouched.
Then Caleb looked down.
His expression changed.
A footprint marked the drift beside his woodpile.
Not his.
Not hers.
Fresh.
Caleb stepped outside.
He found another print.
Then another.
Someone had approached the cabin from the trees.
Stopped near the rear window.
Then returned the way they had come.
Caleb crouched and touched the edge of one impression.
Still sharp.
Hours old at most.
The hairs rose on the back of his neck.
Someone had watched the cabin.
Someone who knew how to travel quietly after a storm.
Caleb stood.
Eight years of solitude vanished in one heartbeat.
He went back inside and barred the door.
Evelyn looked at him.
“What is it?”
Caleb checked the rifle.
“We’re not alone.”
The next morning, Caleb followed the tracks.
He ordered Evelyn to remain in the cabin.
She did not appreciate being ordered.
“I am not a child.”
“No. Children usually listen better.”
Her mouth dropped open.
Caleb nearly smiled.
Nearly.
“Bar the door after me.”
“And if someone comes?”
“There’s a revolver under the cot.”
“I don’t know how to shoot.”
“Point and pull.”
“That is your entire lesson?”
“If someone kicks in that door, it’s enough.”
He left before she could answer.
The stranger’s tracks climbed east.
Whoever made them was good.
Twice, Caleb lost the trail beneath windblown powder.
Twice, he found it again.
A mile from the cabin, he discovered where a horse had been tethered among the pines.
From there, the rider’s trail turned south.
Toward the stage wreck.
Caleb followed.
The coach looked different in daylight.
More deliberate.
The snow had settled enough that he could see gouges in the road above.
Wheel marks.
Deep.
And another set of tracks.
Caleb brushed snow from a splintered section of wood.
A bullet hole.
Then another.
Someone had fired into the coach.
He climbed inside.
The dead passengers were unchanged beneath the cold.
Caleb examined the driver.
There.
A dark hole under the ribs.
Gunshot.
Not broken timber.
Caleb swore quietly.
He searched the dead men.
One carried papers identifying him as a traveling salesman from Helena.
The second had army discharge papers.
The older woman had letters from a daughter in Bozeman.
Nothing connected them.
He returned to the place where Evelyn had been lying.
Between the seats, wedged deep beneath shattered boards, Caleb spotted something dark.
A leather satchel.
He pulled it free.
Locked.
The initials E.V.H. were stamped near the clasp.
Caleb broke it open.
Inside lay a bundle of clothing.
A purse.
Three train tickets.
And documents.
The top page made Caleb’s blood run cold.
It was a marriage certificate.
Evelyn Victoria Harrow.
Married to—
Caleb’s eyes stopped.
He read the name again.
Then a third time.
Impossible.
He sank back against the broken coach wall.
His hands, steady through blizzards, gunfights, and death, had begun to shake.
The husband’s name was Nathaniel Royce Harrow.
Caleb had known Nathaniel Harrow.
Everyone in Mercy Creek once had.
Because eight years earlier, Nathaniel Harrow had been one of the men responsible for murdering Caleb’s wife and son.
Caleb remembered fire.
That was always what came first.
Fire swallowing the roof of the little house he had built himself.
Fire blazing through curtains Anna had sewn.
Fire exploding through the room where six-year-old Jacob slept.
Caleb had been in Mercy Creek buying medicine.
When he returned, there had been men riding away through the trees.
Four of them.
He had recognized only one.
Nathaniel Harrow.
Young then.
Twenty-something.
Son of railroad investor Silas Harrow, who wanted Caleb’s land because surveyors believed a profitable route could cross Ward property.
