They Said No Woman Would Wed the Scarred Blacksmith — Then His Mail-Order Bride Arrived

Chapter 8

Gideon.

She was off her chair and at the bedroom door before the word was fully out. She grabbed his shoulder and shook.

Gideon. Fire.

He was up and moving before his eyes were fully open — boots, trousers, the Colt Single Action Army revolver from the nightstand, the instinct of a man who has learned that the night can produce catastrophes quickly. He kicked the cabin door open and the blizzard came in.

The forge was engulfed.

Three horsemen silhouetted against the orange light, their faces wrapped in scarves. Kerosene lanterns arcing through the dark, shattering against the dry timber of the forge walls. The sound of Jeb Stone’s voice, high and manic over the roar of the wind.

Gideon charged.

He fired a warning shot into the sky and plowed through the snowdrift toward the horsemen, his massive frame cutting through the deep powder. One man brought his horse around and fled. Another hesitated.

And a fourth man, hidden behind the woodpile, swung a pickaxe handle into the back of Gideon’s knees.

He went down hard, his revolver spinning away into the dark. Jeb and two others were off their horses before the snow settled, and they descended on the fallen blacksmith with the calculated brutality of men who had been told there would be no consequences.

Josie stood in the doorway of the cabin.

She watched her husband go down. She watched boots connect with his ribs. She watched Gideon — who was strong enough to shoe four draft horses in a morning, who could bend iron with his bare hands — overwhelmed by numbers and surprise, fighting back but losing ground.

Something happened in Josie that she had not known was possible.

The fear was there. But underneath it, or through it, or perhaps replacing it entirely — a rage so pure and uncomplicated it had the quality of a physical force.

Her eyes moved across the porch.

Gideon’s heavy forging sledgehammer leaned against the railing. Twenty pounds of iron on an oak handle. A tool that most men used two-handed and sparingly.

She grabbed it.

The cold bit into her bare hands. She didn’t feel it.

She came off the porch and through the knee-deep snow at a pace that surprised her and apparently surprised everyone else considerably more. Three hundred pounds, moving at a dead run through blizzard conditions, does not move slowly. She built momentum the way a boulder builds momentum on a slope — past the point where the question of stopping is still relevant.

Get away from my husband.

Jeb Stone turned.

He had perhaps a second to register what was coming before Josie hit him shoulder-first in the center of his chest.

The impact was absolute. It lifted him off his feet. He flew backward through the dark, struck the water trough with a sound that silenced everything, and lay still.

The two remaining men stared.

They had been prepared for a good many things tonight. They had not been prepared for this.

Josie planted her feet in the snow, both hands on the sledgehammer. The blizzard screamed around her. Her nightgown was soaked through and her hair was wild and there was soot on her face from the burning forge and she did not look like a woman who could be reasoned with.

She swung the hammer in a whistling arc and brought the iron head down on the shin of the man standing over Gideon.

The bone broke with a clean, audible crack.

The man went down screaming.

The third man looked at Josie. He looked at Jeb Stone unconscious in the snow. He looked at his colleague on the ground. He dropped his kerosene tin and ran into the blizzard without a word.

Josie let the sledgehammer fall.

Her legs gave out and she went to her knees in the snow beside Gideon and pulled his bruised, bleeding head up into her lap, her hands framing his face.

Gideon. Her voice broke on his name. Gideon, please.

He coughed. His good eye opened. He looked up at her — her face streaked with soot and melted snow, her expression still fierce with the remnants of the terrifying fury that had carried her through the dark — and a slow, incredulous smile moved across the unscarred side of his face.