“Two others,” Jonah repeated, levering a round into his Winchester. “That makes it fair.”

Jonah vanished into the shadows like a ghost. He moved with the practiced stealth of a man who had hunted these mountains for twenty years, keeping his boots on the soft sand and avoiding the dry twigs that littered the ground.

Down in the camp, two men sat near the fire, drinking coffee out of tin cups and playing cards on an upturned wooden crate. One was a tall, scar-faced hunter with a greasy mustache; the other was Silas, his left arm heavily bandaged and slung tightly against his chest from Jonah’s bullet hours earlier.

“Stroud should’ve been back by now,” the greasy-mustachioed man grumbled, slapping a card onto the crate. “How hard is it to kill one old crazy hermit and drag a squaw back?”

“Mercer ain’t an old crazy hermit,” Silas growled, wincing as he shifted his wounded shoulder. “He’s a killer, Frenchy. I seen his eyes. He’s got nothing left to lose. A man with nothing to lose is the worst kind of bad news.”

“Well, he ain’t coming here,” Frenchy scoffed, reaching for the coffee pot. “He don’t even know where—”

A shadow crossed the firelight.

Frenchy blinked, turning his head.

Jonah Mercer stood six feet away, his Winchester brought up to his eye level.

“Evening, boys,” Jonah said softly.

BANG!

The Winchester roared. Frenchy was knocked backward off his crate, his tin cup flying into the fire, spewing embers and hot ash into the air.

Silas shrieked, scrambling backward on his elbows, reaching frantically for his revolver with his right hand. “Mercer! Jesus Christ!”

Jonah didn’t shoot him. He stepped forward, brought the heavy iron barrel of his rifle around in a sweeping arc, and slammed it straight into the side of Silas’s jaw. Silas went down cold, his head bouncing off the hard-packed earth.

Jonah spun around, his rifle aimed toward the canvas tents.

Silence. No third man emerged.

Jonah dropped his rifle to his side and ran straight toward the pine stump near the cliff wall.

The boy, Daniel, jerked his head up, his dark eyes wide with terror as he shrank back against the iron chains. He spoke rapidly in his native tongue, his voice laced with panic.

“Easy, son!” Jonah shouted gently, lowering his weapon and kneeling beside him. “I’m not here to hurt you. Your sister sent me! Nalin!”

At the sound of his sister’s name, the panic vanished from the boy’s eyes, replaced by a desperate, disbelieving hope. “Nalin? She… she is alive?”

“She’s alive. She’s up on the ridge,” Jonah said, pulling a heavy iron pin from his pocket—a iron spike he had grabbed from his barn. He jammed it into the lock of the heavy iron leg irons, using his revolver’s handle as a hammer to strike the spike until the rusted lock snapped open with a sharp crack.

The chains rattled to the dirt.

Daniel stumbled to his feet, his legs stiff and numb from hours of confinement. Jonah caught him, throwing the boy’s arm over his shoulder.

“Can you walk?” Jonah asked.

“I can run,” Daniel gasped in broken English, his face fierce.

“Good,” Jonah said. “Because we need to get—”

A sharp rifle crack shattered the night air from the ridge above them.

BANG!

Jonah’s head snapped up. That shot hadn’t come from the camp. It had come from the thicket where he had left Nalin!

Chapter 9: The Ridge of Red Earth
“Nalin!” Jonah roared.

He didn’t hesitate. He thrust a knife into Daniel’s hand. “Follow me!”

Jonah scrambled up the steep, rocky slope of the ridge, his boots kicking up clouds of red dust and loose gravel. His heart pounded against his ribs like a sledgehammer. The guilt that had dormant inside him for three years roared back to life with terrifying force. Not again, his mind screamed. I won’t lose another one! I won’t leave another one behind!

He burst through the scrub oak thicket, his rifle raised.

Standing in the small clearing was Caleb Stroud.

He hadn’t gone to Fort Bellamy. He had circled back, guessing—correctly—that Jonah would come for the boy.

Stroud was standing over Nalin, who lay on her side in the dirt. Her Colt .38 lay five feet out of her reach; she had fired one wild shot before Stroud had kicked the weapon from her hand. Stroud was holding her by her hair, pulling her head back while his revolver was pressed directly against her temple.

“Drop the rifle, Mercer!” Stroud yelled, his voice echoing off the sandstone canyon walls. “Drop it or I blow her brains all over these rocks!”

Jonah froze ten yards away. Daniel burst out of the brush behind Jonah, stopping dead in his tracks at the horrific sight.

“Let her go, Stroud,” Jonah said, his voice deadly quiet, devoid of all emotion. “This is between you and me.”

“It was between you and me!” Stroud laughed, a crazed, high-pitched sound. “Until you shot my men! Until you ruined a five-hundred-dollar bounty! Look at her, Mercer! She’s nothing! She’s just a ghost in the desert! Why are you dying for a ghost?!”

Nalin looked up at Jonah through her tangled black hair. Despite the gun pressed against her head, despite the bleeding cuts on her face, there was no fear in her dark eyes. Only a profound, luminous clarity.

“Jonah…” she whispered softly, her voice carrying clearly over the howling wind. “It’s okay. You kept your promise. You brought me to Daniel.”

“Shut up!” Stroud snarled, jamming the barrel harder against her forehead.

“Look at me, Jonah,” Nalin continued, her eyes locked onto the cowboy’s gray ones. “You are not a broken man. You saved us.”

“I said shut up!” Stroud screamed.

Stroud turned his head for a fraction of a second to yell at her.

That fraction of a second was all Jonah Mercer needed.

Jonah didn’t raise his rifle. He dropped it.

As the wooden stock hit the dirt, Jonah’s right hand whipped down to his hip with a speed born of twenty years of survival on the frontier. His Colt .45 cleared the holster before Stroud’s eyes could flick back to him.

BANG!

The heavy lead bullet struck Stroud’s right wrist, shattering the bone and sending his revolver flying into the dark brush.

Stroud shrieked in agony, releasing Nalin and clutching his ruined arm.

Nalin rolled instantly away, scrambling on her hands and knees toward her brother. Daniel dove forward, catching his sister and pulling her behind the shelter of a massive red boulder.

Stroud stumbled backward, gasping, blood dripping through his fingers as he stared in horror at Jonah.

Jonah didn’t shoot again. He walked forward slowly, deliberately, his boots crunching on the gravel until he stood eighteen inches from the wounded bounty hunter. He shoved the smoking barrel of his Colt .45 straight into the center of Stroud’s forehead.

“Please…” Stroud whimpered, dropping to his knees, his face pale as chalk under the moonlight. “Don’t kill me, Mercer… please…”