The second she was down, there were loud bangs as the men in the hall fired rifle rounds through the door, splintering the wood by the door lock. The shots hit the marble floor and ricocheted upward into the walls of the chamber.

There was a loud thump, and this time the door flew open and banged against the wall beside it. Two men charged in after it and stopped on either side of the door with shouldered rifles. The next three appeared and took up positions ten feet farther in, scanning for targets.

The last man stopped in the doorway, and then stepped out again, looked back the way he’d come, and posted himself there as a lookout.

One of the two men by the door stepped forward into the council chamber and stood in front of the semicircle of desks. He held his rifle upward in one hand and fired two rounds, a deafening sound in the small space. He yelled, “I want to see you and count you. If I do that, you’re alive. Anybody who doesn’t stand up and come forward on the first call is dead. Do you understand?”

Leah stood up first to show the others it was the only choice. Tentatively, one by one, the others stood up.

The man had an accent. Lee Wolf and Lonny Mann were both from the South, so she was sure this was one of them. “There. Very good,” the man said. “Are you the village council or the school board, or what?”

Mayor Donaldson said, “I’m the mayor, and these people are the city council. Weldonville was a city when it was incorporated in 1873.” He pointed over his shoulder at the city seal mounted on the wall over his desk. Below the picture of the buffalo and the antelope in the long grass, it plainly said, “1873.”

The man called out, “Did you hear that, gentlemen? The city council and the mayor himself. The Lord seems to have guided us to the right place at His chosen time.” There was no doubt now. He was Lee Wolf.

“Who are you?” Nell Hoagland asked. “And what do you want here?”

“I guess you could say we’re here because you didn’t leave well enough alone. It’s been over two years since the Weldonville prison break. You hired some people, a death squad, to go out and find the twelve men who planned the escape and managed to keep the freedom they had earned. You hired some pretty good hunters. They killed six of us before the rest of us ever heard about it. I hope it cost you a whole lot of money.”

“You’re the missing prisoners?” Dave Hall asked.

“No, we’re the missing free men. The prisoners aren’t missing. They’re all still behind those prison walls because they didn’t have the guts to walk out an open door.”

Phil Haymes said, “What do you want?”