Clara kicked the heavy oak door open. Elias threw Pike onto the floorboards of the kitchen, spun around, and dropped the massive iron bar across the door just as a volley of rifle fire struck the exterior planks, embedding lead inches into the solid spruce logs.
Outside, the horses galloped away toward the open pastures, escaping the hail of fire.
Silence descended inside the cabin—a suffocating, terrifying stillness punctuated only by the ragged breathing of the three defenders and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner.
Elias moved instantly to the window, sliding open a heavy wooden loophole that his grandfather had cut into the shutters during the Indian uprisings of sixty-four. Through the narrow slit, he could see the three riders dismounting behind the log wall of the forge, fifty yards away.
“They aren't coming across the open yard,” Elias said, his chest heaving. “They’re going to wait for dark.”
Clara had already torn a clean sheet from the pantry shelf and was kneeling beside Samuel Pike, cutting away his blood-soaked flannel shirt with a butcher knife.
“He’s losing too much blood,” she said, her hands steady despite the tremor in her voice. “The cold kept the wound from hemorrhaging while we were moving, but the heat of the stove is starting the bleeding again. Bring me clean water and the salt jar.”
Elias brought the kettle from the stove and the stone jar of coarse salt. He knelt beside her, holding the old foreman down as Clara washed the black, necrotic edges of the gunshot wound. Pike groaned, his back arching in agony, but Clara spoke to him in a low, soothing murmur—the ancient, instinctive cadence of a woman who had nursed sick children and dying elders through the long Santa Fe winters.
“Be still, Samuel,” she whispered, pressing a salt-crusted cloth directly into the wound to cauterize the infection. “You’ve lived through seventy years of Wyoming winter; you aren't going to die in a kitchen on an empty stomach.”
Pike’s eyes fluttered open. He looked at Clara’s face, smudged with soot and blood, framed by her loose dark braids.
“You’re... you’re the Reyes girl,” the old man wheezed.
“I am Clara Ward,” she said clearly, without hesitation. “And you are going to tell the judge in town how Silas Crowe forged Thomas Ward’s name.”
Pike gave a faint, bloody smile. “I’ll tell him... I’ll tell him until my throat dries out... if we live to see the judge.”
Elias looked at Clara. The words she had spoken—I am Clara Ward—rang in the small kitchen like the strike of an iron anvil. She had not called herself a visitor, an employee, or a temporary partner. She had claimed the name, the blood, and the battle.
He stood up, walked to the corner, and drew his father’s old twelve-gauge double-barreled shotgun from the gun rack, loading both barrels with heavy buckshot.
“They won’t wait until dark,” Elias said, looking through the loophole toward the forge. “The wind is rising again from the north. If they wait, they freeze. They’ll try to take the barn first, to burn us out.”
Clara rose from the floor, wiping her bloody hands on a towel. She picked up her carbine, levered a round into the chamber, and walked to the west loophole beside the stove.
“Then let them come,” she said, her amber eyes burning with an unshakeable, lethal coldness. “We built that fence once, Elias. We aren't letting them burn the house down.”
Outside, through the gathering dusk, the first flaming torch arched through the freezing air toward the dry timber of the Black Creek barn.
The torch struck the cedar shingles of the low lean-to beside the main barn, sputtering briefly in the snow before biting into the pitch-rich pine beneath. A thin, yellow tongue of flame leaped upward, licking at the dry hay protruding from the loft door.
“They’re at the back of the stable!” Elias shouted, throwing open the south kitchen shutter and leveling the ten-gauge shotgun through the opening.
The blast was deafening in the enclosed room, the heavy charge of buckshot tearing through the light snow and chewing into the corner of the forge where one of the snipers was crouching. A man screamed in the dark, dropping his rifle and clutching his shoulder as he scrambled backward into the brush.
“Watch the front!” Clara yelled from the other side of the room.
Through the front loophole, she saw the silhouette of a man running low across the snow, carrying a five-gallon tin of kerosene toward the front porch. It was Red, the half-breed scout.
Clara did not hesitate. She rested the barrel of the carbine on the wooden sill, drew a breath of freezing air through her teeth, and squeezed the trigger.