Chapter 4 - The Arsenal of Bitter Peak
The first pale streak of dawn was just beginning to bleed across the jagged eastern peaks when the heavy oak door creaked open.
Gideon didn't use the front entrance. He dropped silently through a trapdoor in the ceiling of the loft, landing lightly on the main floorboards with a rifle in each hand. His left shoulder was wrapped tightly in clean white linen soaked with a fresh application of pine salve, his movements fluid and entirely unhindered by pain.
"Wyatt," Gideon called out in a low, sharp whisper. "Get up."
The boy was already on his feet, fully dressed in his heavy wool trousers and boots. Over the past three hours, sleep had been entirely forgotten. While the younger children dozed fitfully by the dying embers of the hearth, Wyatt had spent the night listening to Gideon explain the topography of Bitter Peak, memorizing the blind spots, the escape tunnels, and the choke points along the mountain trail.
"I'm ready," Wyatt said, his voice steady. The adolescent petulance of the previous evening was gone, replaced by the grim, hardened resolve of a boy forced to become a man overnight.
"Good," Gideon said, tossing a heavy leather belt fitted with a double-action Colt revolver and a cartridge pouch across the room. Wyatt caught it clumsily, his hands struggling with the unfamiliar weight of the steel. "Strap it low on your right hip. Never draw unless you intend to pull the trigger, and never pull the trigger unless you are aiming to put a man in the ground. This isn't Oak Haven. On Bitter Peak, hesitation is a shallow grave."
Josephine stepped out from the narrow hallway leading to the back bedrooms, her expression ice-cold. She carried a heavy, ten-gauge double-barreled shotgun across her arms—a weapon her late husband had kept hidden beneath their floorboards for hunting wolves.
"You're not arming my fourteen-year-old son to fight your war, Gideon," Josephine said, her voice dropping into a dangerous, glacial register.
"I'm arming him so he doesn't end up hanging from an oak tree by sundown," Gideon retorted without missing a beat. He walked past her toward the far wall, where a massive wooden panel was concealed behind a row of hanging pelts. He pulled a heavy iron lever, and the panel slid open with a deep, grinding groan.
Inside was an armory that made Wyatt gasp.
Row upon row of repeating rifles, crates of brass-cased ammunition, kegs of black powder, and boxes of dynamite sticks were stacked neatly against the reinforced stone walls of the mountain alcove. It looked less like a hermit’s cabin and more like a forward operating base for an elite cavalry troop.
"Where... where did you get all of this?" Josephine stared, the shotgun dipping slightly in her grip.
"When the Silver Creek syndicate took my land and framed me for crimes I didn't commit, they made one fatal mistake," Gideon said, his fingers brushing over the stock of a Winchester rifle. "They left the supply trains unguarded during the winter storms. I’ve been stocking this cache for five years, waiting for the day the men who ruined my life finally decided to come looking for what they stole."
"And you brought them straight to our doorstep," a new voice interrupted.
Clara stood at the end of the hallway, her arms crossed over her chest, her young face hardening into an expression that mirrored her mother’s fierce independence. "You saved us from the mayor just so you could use us as bait to draw them out, didn't you? We're just chess pieces in your revenge game."
Gideon paused. He turned slowly to face the young girl, his scarred face expressionless. For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the whistling of the wind against the cabin's reinforced shutters.
"If I wanted bait, Clara, I could have left you in the town square," Gideon said quietly, his voice carrying a heavy, undeniable truth. "I could have rode away three weeks ago with your father's ledgers and let Clement Reed hang your mother for vagrancy. I didn't come to Oak Haven to start a war. The war started the day Thomas Dalton found out what was buried in Shaft Four. I just chose a side."
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He walked over to the open armory panel, pulled down two heavy woolen bandoliers of ammunition, and slung them over his broad shoulders.
"They're coming," Gideon said, his dark eyes shifting toward the narrow, frosted window overlooking the valley switchbacks. "Three riders. Moving fast. And they aren't wearing sheriff's badges."
