THE MOUNTAIN MAN’S GHOST: THE CHILD HE NEVER KNEW
THE MOUNTAIN MAN’S GHOST: THE CHILD HE NEVER KNEW
(Part 2)
The cabin went so still that the only sound was the crackle of pine knots giving way to embers in the hearth.
Nathaniel Blackwood did not breathe. His fingers, calloused from years of gripping axes and iron reins, trembled as he took the open locket.
Beneath the curved glᴀss sat the painted miniature. Catherine’s face—gentle, with that quiet tilt to her smile he used to see every time he closed his eyes—looked back at him. But nestled against her shoulder was a child. Dark curls, pale skin, and eyes the exact shade of mountain slate.
His eyes.
“Seven,” Nathaniel whispered, the word tearing out of his throat like barbed wire. “She would be seven.”
“Her name is Clara,” Rebecca said softly. “My father wrote it down on the final leaf of the journal. Born seven months after you were ambushed at the crossing.”
Nathaniel sank heavily onto the wooden bench beside the table. The legendary “Iron Wolf,” the man who had traded bullets with ruthless cutthroats without so much as flinching, looked as though an axe blade had cleaved straight through his ribs.
“Silas pulled me out of that dirt,” Nathaniel muttered, his voice hollow, staring into the dark grain of the pine floorboards. “He poured whiskey into my shoulder wound. He sat by me when the fever raged and I was screaming her name. He listened to me beg God to let me live so I could ride back to Oregon… and all the while, he knew?”
“He didn’t just know, Mr. Blackwood,” Rebecca said, her voice shaking as she turned the yellowed pages of the journal. “He was hired to lead those three outlaws through the pᴀss. My father was their scout.”
Nathaniel’s head snapped up. The gray in his eyes went cold and dangerous.
“Read it,” Rebecca pleaded, pushing the book across the table. Her hands were shaking so hard she spilled a few dark drops of coffee onto the timber. “Please. Before you curse his grave, read what he wrote.”
Nathaniel pulled the journal toward him. The handwriting grew ragged on the subsequent pages, marked with the unsteady tremor of an old man confessing his sins to paper:
October 14, 1878.The contract wasn’t about cattle or gold. Harlan Vance paid two thousand dollars in double eagles to ensure Nathaniel Blackwood never set foot in Bitterroot Valley again. He wanted Catherine. He wanted the Bellamy timberlands. The three men I guided were meant to put Nathaniel six feet under.When the gunfire started, I saw him fight. He took two bullets and killed all three before he fell into the brush. I went down into the ravine to bury him, but the boy was still breathing. God forgive me, I couldn’t finish it. I dragged him out.I lied to him when he woke. I told him Catherine had married Vance a week after he vanished. I told him the letters he sent were burned unopened. I thought if Nathaniel believed she had betrayed him, he would stay in these mountains. If he went back, Vance’s hired army would have slaughtered him, Catherine, and the child.
Nathaniel’s knuckles cracked against the wooden table. The rage was an old, familiar beast, waking from an eight-year sleep with claws of red fire.
Harlan Vance.
The richest timber baron in the territory. The man Catherine’s father had always favored, the man who owned the judges, the sheriffs, and every dry-goods ledger from Boise to Lewiston.
“Silas didn’t keep you here to punish you,” Rebecca said, watching the lethal stillness settle over the mountain man. “He stayed nearby because he was terrified Vance would find out you survived. But three weeks ago, before my father died… someone came to town.”
Nathaniel looked at her, his jaw set like granite. “Who?”
“Two men in city coats, asking questions at the livery about an old trapper named Silas Hartley. They were looking for an old debt, they said. But my father recognized one of them. It was Cole Mercer.”
A chill far colder than the October wind cut through the room.
“Mercer is ᴅᴇᴀᴅ,” Nathaniel said flatly. “I buried a lead ball in his chest at the riverbank.”
“Then you missed his heart,” Rebecca answered. “He’s alive, Mr. Blackwood. He walks with a limp and carries a scar across his collarbone, but he’s very much alive. My father knew they were closing in. That’s why he told me to take the journal, the locket, and run to you the moment he was in the ground.”
“If Mercer knows Silas was here,” Nathaniel said, his tactical instincts instantly overriding the storm of grief, “then he knows this mountain. Did anyone follow you from Silver Bend?”
Rebecca hesitated.
That single second of hesitation hit Nathaniel like an open palm.
“Rebecca,” he demanded, his voice dropping into the low, ᴅᴇᴀᴅly register that outlaws had learned to fear. “Did you take the logging trail through ᴅᴇᴀᴅ Man’s Ridge?”
“I… I had to,” she whispered, her face draining of color. “The main road was watched. But near the three-mile marker, a rider pᴀssed on the upper ridge. I hid in the brush. I thought he didn’t see me…”
Nathaniel didn’t wait to hear the rest.
In three rapid motions, he crossed the cabin. He hooked his fingers into the seam of the floorboards beside the hearth, pulling up two loose pine planks with a single heave. From the dark cavity beneath, he didn’t just pull the worn pH๏τograph of Catherine he had stared at during a thousand lonely nights.
He pulled up a heavy canvas roll.
He unbuckled the leather straps. Inside lay a double-barrel ten-gauge sH๏τgun, two Colt .45 revolvers kept greased and spotless, and several boxes of brᴀss cartridges.
“Blow out the lantern,” Nathaniel ordered quietly.
Rebecca scrambled from the chair and pinched the wick. The cabin plunged into the deep, gray gloom of late twilight, lit only by the red pulse of the fireplace.
Nathaniel stepped to the shuttered window facing the western slope, sliding a narrow view-slit open with the tip of his hunting knife.
Through the stand of towering pines, two hundred yards down the trail, three horses were tied to a low cedar branch.
Moving through the darkening trees on foot were four men, lever-action Winchesters cradled low across their chests. At the head of the group walked a tall man whose left shoulder dipped with every step, a silver watch chain gleaming against his wool coat.
Cole Mercer had found the cabin.
Nathaniel reached into his pocket and slid the silver locket around his neck, letting Catherine and his daughter rest against his collarbone beneath his shirt. He chambered two heavy brᴀss shells into the sH๏τgun with a clean, terrifying click.
“Mr. Blackwood,” Rebecca whispered from the shadows by the hearth, her voice trembling. “What are we going to do?”
Nathaniel didn’t turn around.
“Silas spent eight years keeping me ᴅᴇᴀᴅ so I wouldn’t burn down Harlan Vance’s kingdom,” he said, his voice as merciless as the coming mountain winter. “He was wrong.”
He turned his eyes back to the four figures slipping between the trees.
“They didn’t just come for the journal, Miss Hartley. Look through that side seam.”
Rebecca crept forward and peered through the chink in the timber.
Behind the four armed men, tied to the pommel of Mercer’s saddle, was something that made the air freeze in her throat.
A small child’s bonnet, trimmed with fraying blue lace, soaked through with mountain mud.
