PART 2

The Wyoming wind whipped across the dry dirt of the yard, carrying the metallic click of three revolvers cocking in unison.

“Stand behind me, Henry! Take Samuel!” Thomas rasped, his vision swimming with black edges as the rattlesnake venom pulsed through his veins. Every breath felt like inhaling crushed glᴀss, but the sight of Charles Whitmore walking through the gate drove the father to his knees, clawing at the porch post to haul himself upright.

“Stay down, Thomas!” Abigail cried, stepping between the wounded cowboy and the armed men. She pulled Rosie behind her skirts and gathered baby Benjamin тιԍнтer against her chest.

“Step aside, Abigail,” Whitmore sneered, tapping his polished leather riding crop against his thigh. He wore a tailored charcoal wool coat that looked absurdly clean against the dust of the frontier. Behind him, two scarred hirelings fanned out, their hands resting heavy on the grips of their holsters. “You ran out of places to hide when you took the schoolhouse post. Did you really think you could sneak my blood onto this dirt farm and play happy family?”

“Your blood?” Thomas wheezed, his swollen wrist throbbing violently. He stared through sweat-stung eyes at the tiny infant sleeping in Abigail’s arms. “Benjamin… Benjamin is my son. Eleanor carried him! She went into labor during the winter storm while I was out hauling timber from the high ridge!”

“Is that what she told you, Walker?” Whitmore laughed—a dry, brittle sound that made little Rosie whimper. “You poor, gullible sod. Eleanor’s pregnancy ended two months before that storm. She miscarried in silence while you were off clearing pastures, terrified that losing another child would break you.”

Thomas felt the earth drop out from beneath his boots. “No… no, she wouldn’t…”

“She had to, Thomas,” Abigail whispered, her voice breaking as tears spilled down her dust-streaked cheeks. “Eleanor was my sister.”

Thomas froze, the venom’s burning chill forgotten for a split second. “Your… sister?”

“My half-sister,” Abigail confessed, clutching the infant closer. “Our father was Dr. Foster in Cheyenne. Eleven months ago, Charles Whitmore forced me into a marriage contract under threat of foreclosing on our father’s clinic. When I found out I was with child, Charles made it clear what kind of man he was—he told me if it was a girl, he’d send her away to a workhouse, and if it was a boy, he’d take him and lock me in an asylum so I could never claim a dime of his family’s trust.”

Abigail looked down at the tiny sleeping boy, her hands trembling.

“I fled Cheyenne in the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ of winter. Eleanor was the only family I had left. When I arrived at your cabin, half-frozen and in labor, Eleanor was mourning the child she had just lost in secret. She took my baby boy into her arms, looked at me, and said: ‘Thomas will love him as his own. And Charles will never look for a banker’s heir in a cowboy’s cradle.’“

“A touching tale of frontier sisterhood,” Whitmore interrupted coldly, drawing a nickel-plated Colt from his duster. “Too bad it ends in a shallow grave. Eleanor took my child, hid him among her litter, and thought she could buy your silence with a family legacy. But she got careless.”

Thomas’s pulse hammered like a war drum in his ears. He remembered the night Eleanor pᴀssed. The sudden violent sickness. The fever that took her in less than twenty-four hours while he rode desperately through the mud to fetch a doctor who never came.

That’s the bad man who came to see Mama the night she went away, Rosie’s small voice echoed in his head.

Thomas dragged his eyes up to Whitmore’s smug, unblemished face. “You didn’t come here eleven months ago just looking for Abigail. You were in my house.”

“Eleanor was stubborn. Just like her sister,” Whitmore replied without a flicker of remorse. “She refused to tell me where Abigail was hiding. She swore the baby was hers, born of your seed. So I gave her a little powder in her evening tea—just enough to loosen her tongue. Pity her heart was so weak. The concoction worked faster than expected.”

A feral, guttural roar ripped from Thomas’s chest. The agony of the snakebite vanished under an ocean of primal, suffocating rage. He lunged off the porch steps, hurling his broad frame toward the banker with bare hands—

A gunsH๏τ splintered the porch rail beside Thomas’s ear, the muzzle blast throwing him into the dirt. His swollen arm hit the earth, sending a white-H๏τ spasm of agony straight to his heart.

“Next one takes off your kneecap, cowboy,” the gunman to the left growled, smoke curling from his barrel.

“Hand over the boy, Abigail,” Whitmore commanded, stepping over Thomas’s sprawled body. “The child carries the Whitmore name, and under territorial law, a father’s claim supersedes an unwed runaway’s. Hand him to me, or my men will ensure none of these four children live to see the sunset.”

Abigail stepped back until her shoulders hit the rough cedar siding of the cabin. Henry and Samuel threw their small arms around her knees, sobbing uncontrollably.

“You’ll have to shoot me first, Charles,” she said, her chin lifting with defiant steel.

“Don’t flatter yourself, darling. I have no qualms about doing exactly that,” Whitmore said, raising the revolver and aiming it directly between her eyes.

“WHITMORE!” a voice cracked from behind them.

The old ranch hand, who had slipped behind the barn during the chaos, stepped into the open holding a double-barreled ten-gauge sH๏τgun leveled straight at Whitmore’s back.

“Drop that iron, banker, or I paint this fence with your guts!”

One of Whitmore’s hired men spun and fired.

The old ranch hand took the bullet in his shoulder with a sharp grunt, but as he fell backward into the hay, his finger jerked the trigger.

The deafening roar of the ten-gauge tore through the yard. BucksH๏τ ripped across the hitching post, tearing through the leg of Whitmore’s second gunman, sending him crashing into the dust, screaming and clutching his shattered knee.

The sudden blast spooked the horses, their violent bucking kicking up a blinding wall of red dirt.

In the confusion, Thomas rolled across the ground, reaching beneath the broken porch steps with his good left hand.

His fingers found the cold, heavy iron of the rusted Colt he kept hidden behind the bottom riser—the very place he had been reaching when the rattlesnake struck him an hour before.

“Whitmore!” Thomas bellowed through the swirling dust.

The banker whipped around, raising his nickel-plated pistol.

Thomas fired first.

The heavy lead slug punched through Whitmore’s right shoulder, spinning the banker around and slamming him hard against the wooden gate. His pistol clattered uselessly into the dirt.

Whitmore cried out, clutching his bloody arm, staring at the venom-poisoned cowboy who was dragging himself forward on one knee, his gun still leveled, his eyes filled with the cold wrath of a man who had already lost his wife.

“Get… get me out of here!” Whitmore shrieked to his uninjured rider.

The lone standing gunman hauled his bleeding boss onto the back of his horse, while the wounded man on the ground scrambled desperately onto his own saddle. Within seconds, the three men were fleeing toward town, leaving a frantic trail of dust in their wake.

The yard fell into a terrifying silence, broken only by the wailing of the terrified children.

The Colt slipped from Thomas’s limp fingers.

The venom had reached his chest. His breathing was a ragged, shallow rasp. The sky above him spun from blinding blue to pitch black.

“Thomas!” Abigail fell to her knees in the dirt beside him, cradling his head in her lap while tears washed the grime from her face. “Stay with me! Please, Thomas! Henry, bring the water bucket! Samuel, the clean rags!”

Thomas looked up through the dark mist creeping over his sight. He felt her warm hand pressing against his cold, clammy cheek.

He weakly reached up, his trembling fingers brushing against baby Benjamin’s cheek as the infant lay tucked against Abigail’s shoulder.

“Eleanor…” Thomas whispered, his voice fading to a fragile thread. “She saved your boy… because she loved you.”

“And you saved him today,” Abigail sobbed, pressing her forehead against his. “Hold on, Thomas. The doctor is in town. I’ll get you to town. I know how to cut the venom—my father taught me—”

“No time…” Thomas gasped, his heart fluttering erratically in his chest. “Listen to me, Abigail… Eleanor’s letter… the bottom drawer… in the sideboard…”

Abigail blinked through her tears. “What?”

“There’s… another deed…” Thomas rasped, his eyes rolling back as his consciousness began to slip into the dark. “Benjamin… he isn’t the only child… Eleanor hid…”

His head fell back against her arm. His eyes closed.

And as the four little children wailed around them beneath the burning sun, the sound of a dozen galloping horses rumbled in the distance—not from the direction of town where Whitmore had fled, but from the southern ridge.

A posse of territorial marshals swept over the crest of the hill, their badges gleaming in the sun.

And riding at their front was a woman in black riding leathers, her face veiled against the dust, clutching an identical leather envelope in her gloved hand.