Chapter 37 - The Midnight Infiltration
By ten o’clock that night, the fog had crawled up from the river bottoms, swallowing the lower pastures in a thick, woolly darkness. Miller’s Gap was silent, but it was the silence of a cocked pistol.
In the kitchen, the green wooden crate sat open on the harvest table. It did not contain surveying equipment. Inside lay an array of high-grade civilian surveying transits, night-vision binoculars purchased during the coal strikes of the nineties, and three military-grade signal flares Gerald had scavenged from his national guard days.
Dorothy had spread the topographical maps across the oilcloth, right beside a pan of cold roast chicken and biscuits she had baked that morning. She ate a biscuit calmly, chewing with deliberate slowness while Laurent checked the action on the ten-gauge shotgun.
"They won't wait until Thursday," Dorothy said, wiping her fingers on a linen napkin. "A man like Rochefort doesn't sleep in a roadside motel waiting on a court in Lyon. He knows the farmers are guarding the lower bridge. He’ll come down the logging trail from the crest behind the chapel."
"If he breaches the orchard," Laurent said, "he can plant false survey pins and claim disputed boundary jurisdiction before the federal marshals arrive."
"He won't breach the orchard," Dorothy said, standing up and sliding Gerald’s old Colt .38 revolver into her jacket pocket. "Because we are going to meet him at the stone wall."
Kevin looked at his mother, his eyes wide with a mixture of terror and fierce pride. "Mom, you can't go up there in the dark. It’s two miles of rocky trail."
May you like
Dorothy looked at her son—the boy who had sat silent at Thanksgiving while his wife pushed her out of her own dining room, but who had now spent three days sleeping on an iron cot in the barn to protect his father’s legacy.
"I walked that trail pregnant with you, Kevin," she said softly. "I know every root, every loose shale rock, and every blackberry thorn on that mountain. You carry the flares. Laurent, take the flank. Let’s go remind these gentlemen whose mountain they’re standing on."
