PART 2 — THE FROZEN GRAVE OF SECRETS… AND THE BEAST IN THE BLIZZARD!
PART 2 — THE FROZEN GRAVE OF SECRETS… AND THE BEAST IN THE BLIZZARD! 😱❄️
The wind roared like a dying beast through the open door, scattering snow across the braided rug.
Eleanor backed away, her hands clutching the silver locket against her chest until the metal bit into her skin. “Margaret… You touched my sister?!”
Charles Voss kicked the door shut behind him, shaking frost from his heavy beaver-fur coat. The silver-hilted revolver in his leather holster gleamed in the firelight. He tossed Samuel’s shredded, blood-soaked felt hat onto the kitchen table with a sickening thud.
“Your precious sister was too clever for her own good, Eleanor,” Charles sneered, taking slow, deliberate steps toward her. “Ten years ago, your father died without a will—or so everyone thought. Margaret found the true land grant deed in the county archives. A deed proving this valley sits atop the richest vein of copper in the territory, signed directly to both of you.”
Daniel let out a terrified cry and buried his face in Eleanor’s woolen skirt. Eleanor wrapped her arms around the boy, shielding him with her entire body. “You killed her…”
“I tried to,” Charles corrected with a dry, venomous chuckle. “I paid two hired guns to make sure her stagecoach vanished in the pᴀss. But your drifter, Samuel—the valiant mountain foreman—pulled her out of the frozen wreckage before my men could finish the job. He married her under an ᴀssumed name, hiding her from me for a decade while I tore the territory apart looking for that paper!”
Eleanor’s head spun as tears spilled over her lashes. The pieces of the past crashed together like shattered glᴀss. “The rescue disaster… the twelve people who went missing…”
“Was an ambush,” Charles said, leaning down to level his gaze at Daniel. “Samuel led that rescue team straight into my men. I blew the timberline with dynamite to silence the witnesses and pinned the casualties on him. Margaret died of consumption last spring, but Samuel took the deed and ran straight here—to deliver the boy and the land back to you.“
Charles reached into his breast pocket and drew a folded quitclaim deed stamped with an official notary seal. He slammed it onto the table beside the bloodied hat.
“Sign your name beside Margaret’s forged mark, Eleanor,” Charles ordered, his eyes narrowing into slits. “Sign over the deed, and I’ll let you and the bastard boy walk down to the rail depot before the frost takes your fingers. Refuse… and you join Samuel at the bottom of the ravine.”
“Samuel isn’t ᴅᴇᴀᴅ,” Eleanor whispered, her voice shaking with raw defiance. “He survived the worst storms this territory ever saw. A coward like you couldn’t kill him with a knife in the dark.”
Charles laughed—a harsh, mocking bray that filled the cabin. “I cut his safety line and sH๏τ him through the shoulder before he reached the barn. By now, the blizzard has buried him under five feet of drift. Nobody survives zero degrees with a bullet in their flesh.”
He drew his revolver and cocked the heavy hammer with a cold, metallic CLACK.
“Pick up the pen, widow. Three seconds.”
“DON’T YOU TOUCH HER!” Daniel screamed, suddenly breaking away from Eleanor and hurling a heavy iron fire poker straight at Charles’s knees.
The metal struck Voss hard across the shin. The cattle baron grunted in fury, stumbling back, and raised his pistol to strike the boy across the face with the heavy barrel.
“DANIEL!” Eleanor shrieked, lunging forward.
CRASH!
The heavy oak front door didn’t open—it exploded off its iron hinges in a shower of splintered timber and roaring white snow.
A towering silhouette filled the doorway, caked in solid ice and frozen blood.
Samuel Bennett stood there like a vengeful specter risen from the storm. In his right hand was a double-bitted felling axe; his left arm hung limp, soaked in crimson, but his eyes burned with a primal, terrifying fury that froze Charles Voss in his tracks.
“Step away from my son, Voss,” Samuel rumbled, his voice like grinding millstones over the shrieking wind.
Charles panicked, swinging his revolver away from Eleanor to aim directly at Samuel’s chest. “You should be ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, drifter!”
BANG!
The gunsH๏τ roared inside the cabin, deafening them all.
Smoke filled the room, smelling of sulfur and burnt wool.
Samuel didn’t fall. With an enraged roar, he hurled his mᴀssive frame across the room, tackling Voss into the timber wall, shattering the dining table and sending the revolver skittering across the floor. The two men crashed into the snow blowing through the doorway, locked in a brutal struggle of fists and blood.
Eleanor grabbed Daniel and snatched Voss’s fallen gun from the floorboards, cocking it with shaking fingers. “Samuel!”
She rushed to the doorway, ready to fire—
Suddenly, the eerie silence of the blizzard yard was broken by three distinct, rhythmic whistle blasts echoing from the darkness beyond the broken barn.
Hoofbeats pounded through the snowdrift.
Six mounted riders wearing black oilskin coats surrounded the shattered porch, their long rifles trained not just on Samuel, but straight into the cabin at Eleanor and Daniel.
The man leading the riders swung down from his horse. He wasn’t one of Voss’s ranch hands.
He wore the silver star of a United States Marshal on his sheepskin vest.
The lawman aimed a sawed-off sH๏τgun directly at Samuel’s throat, while stepping between the bleeding men.
“Hold your fire, all of you!” the Marshal shouted over the howling gale.
Charles Voss spat blood into the snow and grinned wickedly from the ground. “Marshal! Thank God! Arrest this murderer—he ᴀssaulted me!”
The Marshal didn’t look at Voss. He kept his eyes locked on Eleanor, who stood trembling on the porch with the child.
The lawman pulled a yellowed telegraph wire from his coat, his expression hardened like winter stone.
“I’m not here for Voss, and I’m not here for the drifter,” the Marshal announced, his voice slicing through the icy wind.
He pointed the barrel of his sH๏τgun straight at Eleanor’s chest.
“Eleanor Whitmore… by order of the Federal Court of Helena, you are under arrest for the poisoning and murder of your late husband, Thomas Whitmore—whose body was just dug up from an empty grave three miles south!”
TO BE CONTINUED… 😱❄️
