PART 3

The staircase creaked under the weight of the man standing below, but nobody moved. The air between the wooden rafters felt suffocatingly thin.

Harrison gripped the polished banister until the knuckles of his bandaged hands burned. Down in the shadows of the lower landing stood Arthur Vance—once the chief auditor of Montgomery Cattle & Land, a man Harrison had believed died in an offshore rail accident three years back.

“You’re supposed to be in a grave in Galveston,” Harrison growled, his deep Texas drawl dropping into an icy, dangerous register.

“Graves are for men who run out of leverage, Harrison,” Vance replied, tapping the wax-sealed parchment against his leather palm. “Caldwell and I made sure the telegraph lines reported what suited the books. And what suited the books was keeping you blind while we liquidated your northern holdings through regional branch banks.“

Beside Harrison, Rebecca leaned against the doorframe of her brother’s room, her knuckles white against her apron. Her voice trembled, but her eyes blazed with fury. “You used my father. You drove him into an early grave claiming he was drowning in debt!”

“Your father was the chief notary for the Santa Fe railroad line, Miss Collins,” Vance said, his scarred mouth twisting into a mocking smirk. “Five years ago, Elizabeth Montgomery didn’t die of a quiet fever on the San Antonio estate. She died in an apothecary H๏τel three miles outside of Topeka—right after handing your father a sworn deposition declaring she was being poisoned with arsenic tinctures.”

Harrison’s chest seized. The room seemed to tilt beneath his boots.

“What did you say?” Harrison whispered, taking one heavy step down the stairs.

“Elizabeth found out Caldwell and I were siphoning company bonds into dummy charters,” Vance sneered, his gaze never leaving Harrison. “When she threatened to bring the ledger books to the federal circuit judge in St. Louis, Caldwell subsтιтuted her daily cough tonic. She fled north on an unmarked coach, desperate to reach her family. But she only made it as far as this town. Your father, Rebecca, hid her in the back room of this very restaurant during her final forty-eight hours.”

Rebecca pressed a hand to her mouth, stifling a ragged sob as the fragmented memories of her youth collided into sharp, horrifying focus. She remembered the carriage arriving in the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ of winter. The pale, elegant woman wrapped in mink, coughing blood into linen napkins. The hushed whispers in her father’s study.

“My father took an oath to protect her deposition,” Rebecca choked out. “That’s why Caldwell came back with those phony notes. He didn’t want the mortgage money… he wanted the deed to tear this foundation apart!”

“Exactly,” Vance said, pulling a short-barreled Colt from under his broadcloth coat and leveling it ᴅᴇᴀᴅ at Harrison’s chest. “Old man Collins hid Elizabeth’s signed testimony somewhere inside the masonry of this building before his heart gave out. Caldwell got greedy, squeezing you for monthly tribute while he searched. But the railroad right-of-way deal closes on Friday. We can’t afford you playing poor cowboy on the premises, Montgomery.”

Vance cocked the hammer with a sharp, sickening click.

“Hand over your wallet and step down here. We’re going to have a little fire in the kitchen, and Dodge City will read about another tragic grease fire consuming a bankrupt diner.”

Down the hall, little Samuel began to cough, a weak, agonizing rattle that broke the standoff.

Rebecca didn’t scream. She didn’t cower.

Years of carrying heavy cast-iron skillets and stoking boiling hearths moved her body before fear could paralyze it. She grabbed the heavy brᴀss oil lamp hanging from the wall bracket beside the landing and hurled it down the stairwell with all the force in her arms.

The glᴀss shattered against Vance’s shoulder, spraying burning whale oil across his coat and the pine treads.

Vance cursed, stumbling backward onto the restaurant floor as flames leaped along the sleeve of his heavy wool jacket. His sH๏τ went wild, embedding a lead ball into the ceiling plaster above Harrison’s head.

Harrison didn’t give him the chance to level the weapon a second time.

He vaulted the last four steps, tackling the older man into the center dining table. The wood splintered with a deafening crash. Harrison drove his forearm across Vance’s throat, pinning him to the floorboards while knocking the revolver skittering across the floor.

“Who supplied the poison, Vance?” Harrison roared, his face inches from the gasping auditor, the polished disguise of ‘Harry the drifter’ completely gone, replaced by the lethal fury of a cattle king who had just learned the truth of his life’s greatest sorrow. “Was it Caldwell?”

“Caldwell… and the district marshal,” Vance choked out, clawing desperately at Harrison’s iron grip. “The courthouse… the warrants are already signed to burn this block down at dawn…”

Rebecca rushed down the stairs, tossing a heavy wet burlap sack over the flames licking the baseboard before they could spread to the dry cedar framing. She grabbed the discarded Colt from beneath a bench, thumbing the hammer back with a steady hand.

“Harrison,” she called, her voice clear above the crackling smoke. “Look outside.”

Through the frosted front windows, two black buggies had pulled up across the snow-covered street. Silhouettes with long rifles were stepping down into the December drift.

Harrison hauled Vance to his feet by his collar, dragging him toward the back pantry. He turned to Rebecca, his eyes meeting hers—no longer testing, no longer hiding behind counterfeit poverty.

“Pack Samuel in the wool blankets,” Harrison ordered, his voice ringing with absolute command and an unspoken promise. “There’s a private locomotive sitting on the siding two miles east with my private telegrapher aboard. In two hours, I’m buying every rail line and bank in this county—and we’re going to tear Caldwell’s empire down to the dirt.”