Heather Graham - The Hidden

Jillian...and their child. Fear swept over him like a tidal wave.

He was instantly alert, afraid to move until he recognized the source of danger.

He wished to hell he’d thought to get himself a good guard dog. But at first there had been no reason to fear anyone, nothing to worry about except an angry bear.

There still shouldn’t have been anything to worry about.

He lay in the darkness, listening. He felt as he had sometimes during the brutal years of the Civil War, as he lay asleep in his tent on the cold earth, where the men slept wherever they had fallen in exhaustion after retreat had been sounded.

He felt as if the enemy might come at any minute, guns blazing and bayonets ready.

All his fears then had been of the enemy, of battle, guns and swords, the sound of horses shrieking, caught in the fire, dying in the mud. The sound of men screaming, the scent of burning flesh that coincided with horrible pain and despair.

But the enemy was no longer the enemy, at least not on paper. And not according to the greatest general the United States—and the Confederacy—had ever nurtured, Robert E. Lee.

When they’d lain down their arms, Lee had urged that they all sue for peace.

It had taken Nathan a few years to truly understand the concept.

His own home had been razed in the fighting. His parents had passed away during the war years. His only brother had been killed at Shiloh.

Peace, General Robert E. Lee had said. They were beaten. No more blood, no more horror. Find peace. But for some, many of them in Nathan’s company, drawn from what had become West Virginia during the middle of the war, the war hadn’t ended. For a while he’d fallen in with them. Brian Gleason’s home at Front Royal had been burned to the ground, Jeff Bay’s wife had died in childbirth while they’d been away fighting and Billie Merton’s father had sided with the North. All had felt they had nothing left but to keep fighting, which meant stealing anything that belonged to the hated Northerners.

He hadn’t thought it such a bad thing to rob banks owned by carpetbaggers. Or even to hold up stagecoaches as they moved westward, filled with more carpetbaggers from the North. He’d had no problem joining up with a few of the other men from his infantry company to become bandits—like Robin Hood, of course, stealing from those who had descended on the broken and bleeding South like a horde of vultures.

But then they had killed someone during a bank robbery.

And Nathan had wanted out. War was one thing—it was horrible and ugly, killing men with different ideals who just wanted to go home as much as he did. But that was kill or be killed.

Cold-blooded murder was another thing, and more than he could bear at this stage of his life.

Peace.

He had found it in the Colorado Territory.

A little bit of money had purchased a nice piece of land from old Rollo Conway, a worn-out prospector who hadn’t done so well, up on a plateau that looked out on the majestic peaks of the Rockies. The ranch still bore his name.

A fellow named Joel Estes had founded Estes Park, the nearby community that bore his name, around 1859, and since then, rich Europeans and inquisitive naturalists had come to marvel at the place, along with prospectors determined to search for riches in the nearby multitude of mountain streams.

Nathan panned for gold himself, but he kept quiet about his discoveries, because he didn’t really want to be a gold miner. He wanted to be a rancher. He wanted simple things. The precious gold bits he’d found were nothing but a means to an end. He wanted a stable and a home, both of which he was more than willing to build by hand. Hard labor, working to erase his painful memories, was his way of finding a new life.

And then he’d met Jillian at the little church just down the mountain. She’d been there with her father, United States Marshal Tom Vickers, and though Vickers hadn’t liked him, Jillian had fallen head over heels in love with Nathan. When Marshal Vickers had left town to do his duty in the surrounding countryside, Jillian had talked Father Ferguson into marrying them. After all, they were both of legal age, so that had been that.

After all those brutal years, he’d found peace.

Peace and that rare, elusive feeling called happiness.

But tonight...

What in God’s name was it? The slight difference in the breeze, the rustle as it moved through leaves just beginning to hint of fall...

The bugles were silent now.

But there was something out there...

He jumped out of bed and grabbed his Colt. It wasn’t as cumbersome as the the Enfield rifle he’d carried during the war. No, it had come from his outlaw days, an army rifle manufactured at the end of the war, and offering precision aim and six bullets that could be fired in quick succession.

He looked at his wife, his precious wife, where she still lay sleeping. And he looked at his child, his son , sleeping just as peacefully.

He walked to the window of their upstairs bedroom and looked out on the world he had forged on the little mountaintop plateau. Storage and stables to his right, smokehouse and bunkhouse to his left. So far, no one was sleeping in the bunkhouse; he was just getting to where he could afford to hire the ranch hands who would fill it.

Great trees stretched high to the heavens in the night sky, visible by the light of a slightly waning moon. He heard a horse neigh and that seemed like another warning.

He wished again that he’d gotten dogs; the cats he kept as ratters in the stables wouldn’t be much of an alarm.

What was spooking him? he wondered.

Indians suddenly creeping back to reclaim the area? No, not now, not here.

The ghost of a dead Yankee soldier he might have killed, back to seek his revenge?

Or a living man? His father-in-law, ready to kill them both for defying his edict not to marry?

Who else?

The outlaws he had ridden with until theft had become murder? Jeff Bay, who had led them all? Jeff had become so filled with hatred that he hadn’t understood Nathan’s anger that he’d shot a man in cold blood simply because the victim had come from the North.

Or were Brian Gleason, Billie Merton and the other outlaws he’d ridden with angry because he had opted out?

He jumped suddenly as his wife slipped her arms around him. He’d been so lost in his thoughts that he hadn’t heard her come up behind him.

“Nathan,” she said softly. “What is it?”

He turned, holding her close, feeling the beat of her heart and the warmth of her body. “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought something was out there.”

“It’s nothing, my love,” she told him. “Come back to bed.”

He nodded and turned back to the window for one last look.

And then he saw it, a shadow slipping from the storage shed next door.

“Stay here,” he told Jillian. “Look after the baby.”

Nathan crept quietly down the stairs. He unbolted the front door as silently as he could, then slid outside, using the wall as cover, straining to see in the darkness.

The shadow was still there by the storage shed. It seemed to be lumbering.

He almost laughed out loud.

A bear.

He stepped out on the porch, thinking to fire a warning shot, so the creature would amble off without doing any harm.

Without warning, he was hit. A blow to the head sent him stumbling forward, tripping over the steps to the porch, and he landed hard in the dirt with his head spinning so wildly that he saw stars in the sky that weren’t there.

He blinked to clear his eyes and realized that he’d been attacked by a monster.

No, not a monster.

A man.

A man in a bizarre mask and hat.

“Coward,” Nathan whispered. “Show yourself.”