The first rifle shot disappeared into the blizzard.
The second struck granite twenty feet above the three riders and sent a spray of stone chips into the screaming wind.
That one they heard.
The men hauling thirty terrified Hereford heifers toward Dead Man’s Gulch jerked their horses around as the herd stopped bunching against the narrowing pass.
For several seconds, nobody could tell where the shot had come from.
Snow moved sideways beneath the black December sky. Lanterns swung wildly from saddle horns. The cattle bawled in confusion, hooves punching through crusted drifts. Somewhere beyond them lay a ravine deep enough to kill every animal that went over its edge.
Then one of the riders saw her.
A woman stood in the narrowest part of the pass.
Not on horseback.
Not hiding behind a boulder.
Standing directly in the only route through which the stolen cattle could be forced.
Martha Higgins had left the ranch on a low freight sled pulled by the massive Percheron draft horse because no ordinary saddle, no ordinary horse, and certainly no sensible rider would have attempted to carry a woman who weighed nearly three hundred fifty kilograms through snow that deep. Now the sled rested sideways behind her, its iron runners half buried, while the draft horse stood steaming under a wool blanket.
Martha herself wore a heavy canvas coat over layers of wool, the hem already frozen solid. Snow clung to her pinned brown hair and thick shoulders. Her breath came hard from the effort of moving from the sled to the pass, but her hands were steady.
Josiah Caldwell’s Winchester rested against her shoulder.
The nearest rider squinted through the storm.
“What in God’s name—”
Martha levered another round into the chamber.
“Turn the cattle.”
The wind ripped half the words away.
But the rifle translated them.
The second rider laughed.
He was broad through the chest, scarf covering the lower half of his face. A black oilskin coat snapped behind him.
“That cook?”
One of the others recognized her too.
“The fat woman from Caldwell’s place.”
Martha did not react.
She had heard worse from men with better manners.
“Turn the cattle,” she repeated.
The broad rider leaned toward his saddle horn.
“You planning to stop thirty head by yourself?”
“No.”
Martha nodded toward the granite walls around them.
“The mountain is.”
The man’s eyes narrowed.
Only then did he notice what she had done.
Before leaving the ranch, Martha had studied Josiah’s property maps often enough to know that Dead Man’s Gulch had two approaches. The southern route was broad and gradual. The western approach narrowed sharply between two granite shoulders before opening toward the drop.