“We Want Her, Daddy!” The Mountain Man’s Twins Chose the Widow the Town Called ‘Too Wide to Wed’
Chapter 5
“You are a magnificent creature, Ruth Calloway.” The words carried the weight of an absolute, undeniable truth.
Ruth looked up at the towering mountain man, her heart hammering against her ribs. For the first time in her life, she did not feel too big, or too loud, or too much.
She felt exactly right.
Ruth checked every horse herself, running her work-calloused hands down their trembling legs, whispering to them in the low, steady voice she used for frightened things, until their great rolling eyes went calm. Only then did she let herself shake.
They stood in the dark yard a long moment, listening to the fire hiss and settle. The twins had dragged the two groaning men to the side of the barn and were standing guard over them with the ferocious dignity of small wolves. Ruth looked at the charred wall of the barn, then at the man beside her.
“You came down off that ridge for supplies,” she said. “You didn’t have to stay.”
“The boys made their choice,” Ezra said. “So did I.”
Ruth turned to look at him. In the dark, his face was all hard planes and shadows, lit by the dying orange of the embers. “You barely know me, Ezra Vance. I could be anything — a swindler, a gossip, a woman who burns down her own barn for the insurance.”
Ezra almost smiled. “You think I can’t read a body by now? I’ve been reading tracks and weather for forty years.” He took a step closer. “You’re the kind who runs into a burning barn to save a horse that isn’t hers. That’s the whole report, and it’s all I need.”
Ruth’s breath caught. He was close enough that she could smell the woodsmoke and pine on him, feel the heat coming off his great frame like a stove. She thought he might kiss her. She wanted him to. And then, from the barn, a voice cracked with terror — Micah — “He’s awake!” — and the moment shattered into practical work.
They did not sleep that night. By the time the embers had gone cold, Pike and Brannigan had been dragged into the barn loft and lashed to the stall posts, and Ruth had built the fire back up in the hearth and put the coffee on. Ezra sat on an upturned feed crate, cleaning his rifle with slow, deliberate strokes, and the twins curled up at Ruth’s feet like a pair of guard dogs, too keyed up to sleep.
Ruth walked over to the two bound men and crouched down in front of Otis Pike, studying his face the way a woman studies a piece of meat she suspects is bad. “Crane paid you to do this,” she said. It was not a question.
Pike spat on the floorboards. “Prove it.”
“Don’t need to.” Ruth’s voice was calm, almost pleasant. “I’ve got the ledger. I’ve got the motive. And now I’ve got two men caught red-handed in my yard with kerosene and torches. Arson’s a hanging offense, Otis. But murder — the murder of a man, sawed through his wagon axle — that’s the rope that won’t burn off.” She paused, letting the weight of it settle. “The way I see it, you’ve got one chance to be the man who told the truth instead of the one who swung for it.”
Pike’s jaw worked. He looked at Ezra, who had not once looked up from his rifle, and the calm of that terrified him more than any shout. “It was two hundred dollars,” he said finally, the words spilling out of him like water from a cracked jug. “Each. He said it was just a barn, just a scare, nobody had to get hurt. But the axle job, two years back…” He swallowed. “He told us it was clean. Just a man in a wagon. It’s been eating at me ever since. It’s a widow’s husband we put in the ground, and I’ve been carrying that like a stone in my boot ever since.”
Ruth stood up. Her hands were shaking, but her voice did not waver. “You’re going to say all of that again,” she said, “in front of a judge.”
Ezra finally looked up. “Crane’ll hang for Nathan,” he said, and it was not a question, and it was not a threat. It was a fact, laid out flat like a surveyor’s map. “And these two’ll be witnesses, or they’ll be buried.”
At dawn, they loaded the wagon.
Dawn came to Juniper Flats in hues of bruised purple and gold. Ruth drove the buckboard down the main street, her back ramrod straight, Nathan’s double-barreled shotgun resting purposefully across her lap. Beside her rode Ezra on his gray horse, a wall of mountain fury. Trailing behind the wagon, bound to the tailgate by thick hemp rope, stumbled Otis Pike and Coot Brannigan, their faces blackened by the fire they had failed to set. In the wagon bed, Jasper and Micah tossed a stolen apple back and forth, indifferent to the gravity of the day.
Whispers erupted from the early risers like startled birds. Ruth kept her eyes on the sheriff’s office. She halted the wagon with a heavy thump of boots on the floorboards, marched up the wooden steps, and slammed Nathan’s ledger directly into the chest of a startled Sheriff Willard Dowd.
“That is proof of motive,” Ruth declared, her voice ringing out like a brass bell. “Proof that Moses Crane owed my late husband thousands of dollars. Proof his ranch is legally forfeit to me.” Ezra shoved the two hired guns onto the porch, where they collapsed in a pathetic heap. “These two tried to burn me alive in my own barn last night. They confessed. Crane paid them to do it — just like he paid them, two years ago, to saw through Nathan Calloway’s wagon axle.”
The gathering crowd gasped in sheer horror. Murder and arson were hanging offenses in the territory, and everyone in Juniper Flats knew it.
“That’s a damn lie!” Moses Crane shoved his way to the front of the crowd, sweating profusely, his silver spurs jingling frantically. “Mountain savages and a bitter, oversized widow making up stories to steal my land!”