Part 2: The Fire in the Snow
Part 2: The Fire in the Snow
The dining room plunged into absolute, suffocating silence.
Mrs. Briggs backed away from Garrison Wolfe like a cornered viper, clutching the silver locket against her chest with white-knuckled fingers. Her lips twitched, her face draining of color until she looked like parchment in the flickering lamp light.
“You’re mad,” Mrs. Briggs hissed, her voice trembling beneath a fragile veneer of arrogance. “Eleanor Holloway was an indigent washerwoman who died of childbed fever in Denver! Beatrice was brought to me as an orphan out of sheer charity! I took this oversized pig in, fed her, gave her roof and purpose!”
“Charity?” Garrison rumbled, taking a single, thunderous step forward. The floorboards groaned beneath his heavy leather boots. “You took her in because Eleanor sent seventy-five dollars in gold drafts every six months through the territorial post to care for her child. Drafts you cashed at the Silver Creek bank under forged signatures.”
Beatrice pressed a trembling hand against her mouth. The bearskin coat draped over her mᴀssive shoulders was heavy, suffocatingly warm, and smelled of woodsmoke and pine needles.
My mother didn’t die?
The words spun through her skull like a violent fever. For twenty-three years, every insult, every blow, every freezing night spent shivering beneath burlap sacks in the dry-goods cellar had been endured under the bitter belief that she was entirely alone in the world—unwanted, unloved, and discarded like refuse.
“That’s a slanderous lie!” Mrs. Briggs shrieked, backing toward the front counter. “Sheriff! Where is Sheriff Vance? Somebody throw this wild animal out of my establishment!”
None of the miners moved. A room full of grizzled pickaxe laborers, men who had just been hooting with cruel laughter at Beatrice’s expense, sat frozen like stone carvings. Not a single man was fool enough to raise an arm against Garrison Wolfe.
“Show her the counter drawer, Briggs,” Garrison said, his voice quiet, flat, and colder than the blizzard rattling the windowpanes. “The false bottom behind your ledger. Or do I rip the oak in two myself?”
Mrs. Briggs’s eyes darted frantically toward the dark hallway leading to the back rooms.
“Beatrice,” Garrison spoke gently, never taking his predatory gaze off the boarding house owner. “The herb blend you used in that venison tonight. Dried sweet marjoram, cracked juniper berries, and wild sage simmered in winter apple cider. That wasn’t a boarding house recipe.”
Tears spilled freely down Beatrice’s flushed cheeks. “My mother… she sang a little nursery rhyme about the mountain kettle when I was tiny. It was the only thing I remembered of her voice. I… I always put those herbs in when I wanted to feel safe.”
“Eleanor taught me that recipe twenty-three years ago,” Garrison murmured, his scarred cheek softening for a split second. “When I found her half-ᴅᴇᴀᴅ in the Black Ridge snowdrift, bleeding from three gunsH๏τ wounds, her wagon burned to the wheels. She had been robbed, sH๏τ, and left for wolves by the very men hired to escort her and her little girl west.”
“Garrison…” Beatrice gasped, her knees nearly buckling under her weight.
“She survived,” he continued. “Her lungs were ruined by the frost, and she couldn’t walk without crutches, but she fought every day to breathe. For twenty-three years, she stayed in my valley because the men who ambushed her told her they had drowned her baby in the creek. Until six months ago, when an old teamster pᴀssing through my camp mentioned a cook in Silver Creek who made a juniper venison stew that tasted like old Virginia hearths.”
Garrison slowly reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a stack of yellowed, ink-stained letters tied with faded blue ribbon—letters bearing the seal of the Denver postmaster, each addressed to Beatrice Holloway, c/o Cordelia Briggs.
“Your mother wrote to you every winter,” Garrison said, his dark eyes burning into Beatrice’s. “She sent money. She sent prayers. And Cordelia Briggs threw you into the snow and took every dime.”
A low murmur of disgust rippled through the rough miners.
“Mrs. Briggs…” one miner grumbled, scraping his chair back. “You told us that girl was a charity case eating your profits.”
“Shut up, all of you!” Mrs. Briggs snarled, suddenly pulling open the drawer behind the register.
Her hand didn’t come out with letters.
It came out with a small, nickel-plated two-sH๏τ derringer.
She leveled the tiny barrel straight at Garrison’s chest. “I built this business with my own sweat! I won’t let a mountain beast and a mountain ape take everything from me!”
Garrison didn’t even flinch. He didn’t blink. He just stepped sideways, his mᴀssive frame completely eclipsing Beatrice from the gun’s sightline.
“Pull the trigger, woman,” Garrison whispered. “And see if two inches of lead can stop what’s coming for you.”
Mrs. Briggs’s hand shook violently. The hammer was drawn back.
Before she could squeeze, the heavy oak front door of the boarding house flew open with a deafening crash.
A howling blast of snow and sub-zero air roared into the dining room, instantly extinguishing half the oil lamps.
Standing in the threshold, cloaked in ice and snow, stood three men in long duster coats, their faces concealed by black wool bandanas. The lead rider held a sawed-off double-barrel sH๏τgun leveled at the entire room.
“Nobody move!” the leader barked, his voice muffled by the storm.
Mrs. Briggs dropped the derringer onto the counter, her face turning from pale to utterly white with horror. “Silas… you weren’t supposed to come during a blizzard!”
The man with the sH๏τgun lowered his bandana, revealing the cold, weathered face of Silas Briggs—Cordelia’s outlaw brother, who was supposedly hanged in Wyoming five years ago.
“The blizzard’s the only reason we rode in, sister,” Silas sneered, his greedy eyes locking onto the mound of raw gold coins Garrison had spilled across the center table. “And it looks like Christmas came early to Silver Creek.”
Then Silas’s eyes drifted toward Beatrice, standing beneath the bearskin coat behind the giant. His sneer vanished into a cruel, knowing smirk.
“Well, well,” Silas chuckled, cocking both hammers of the sH๏τgun. “Look who finally grew up. The little girl we forgot to throw in the creek.”
TO BE CONTINUED… PART 3
