Reaching a bench a few hundred feet above the valley floor, she paused to catch her breath and check her back trail.
What she saw stole her breath all over again and took her hopes and dreams with it.
There, hanging lifeless from the branches of the big cottonwood, illuminated by a pair of torch-bearing riders rooting through his pockets, was her husband.
Cole was dead.
She stared in disbelief, heart hammering.
It couldn’t be true. Couldn’t be, couldn’t be…
But it was.
She knew that it was him and knew he was dead and knew there was nothing she could do to help him now.
They had murdered her husband.
She turned and retched then stared numbly into the darkened forest for a long moment, not wanting to see him, not wanting to see the ghouls searching his pockets.
Then she narrowed her eyes and turned back. If only she had a rifle instead of a pocket pistol.
She was a good shot, and with a decent rifle, she could kill both of those men from this distance, then kill a good number more if they tried to come up here after her.
But she didn’t have a rifle. She had a pocket pistol, good out to ten or twenty yards, maybe. And a knife.
A pitiful arsenal considering the task at hand.
Unable to kill them, she wept, but even as the first tears fell, Mary hauled back on those reins, knowing that she needed to control her emotions if she was going to get justice for her beloved husband.
And she would get justice.
She was determined solely upon that point.
Which meant she needed to be smart. She needed to be smart and survive and get help.
Help from whom?
She didn’t know.
Nor did she know who those men down there were.
Except one of them was the short man from the hardware store. Cole had said that.
That was a start.
Now she just needed to evade these men and do whatever she could to bring the short man and his friends to justice.
She looked back down into the valley to where her poor, dead husband swayed back and forth, jostled by the men searching him. Then they rode off, their laughter growing faint with distance, taking their torches with them.
Darkness enveloped her husband.
And then she was truly alone on that darkened hillside, peering down at the torches that rode back and forth across the valley, the men holding them calling out for her by name.
Finally, the men gathered around her home.
“Burn her out!”
She watched in horror as they tossed their torches inside.
