Like a ringmaster in a circus, Increase took his time, relishing the moment. To Jamie, he was as repulsive as a coffin worm.

The old man came over to him, shoving the whip under his nose. “Do you smell your own blood on this, McKenna?” he asked, sawing each word off with a rusty rasp. “You should.”

Jamie spoke evenly, quietly, and without betraying any emotion at all. “If you want to whip somebody to death, make it me. You’ve no quarrel with Bliss.”

Increase smiled and touched a welt that lay across his face in a red streak, thanks to Bliss’s temper. “Don’t I?”

“Mother of God, man,” Jamie breathed. “Tell me what you want to hear, and I’ll say it!”

Pipher laughed and strutted away toward Bliss. With a practiced flip of his wrist, he unfurled the lash, and the snapping sound made vomit rush into Jamie’s throat.

His knees weakened when he heard the sound of a snapped twig behind him and felt the rawhide binding him beginning to loosen. “This will make up, I’m thinkin’,” Reeve said in a whisper, “for that other time when you needed me and I wasn’t around.”

In an instant, Jamie’s hands were free; he felt the familiar handle of his own blade pressed into his palm. He didn’t look back, lest he reveal Reeve, and even as he stepped away from the tree he feared he might be hallucinating.

A man rushed toward him with a drunken shout, and the blade penetrated that man’s chest with a resounding thunk. His compatriots stood back, their eyes nervously scanning the trees.

Increase’s throat worked as he saw Jamie walking toward him; terror widened his eyes until they seemed to fill his head. His ceaseless hatred made him draw back the whip to strike Bliss, but Jamie stepped into the lash before it reached her. He felt it tear through his shirt, but there was no pain. That would come much later.

Wildly, Increase struck another blow, but Jamie didn’t feel that, either. He just kept advancing until he was face-to-face with the old man. He wrenched the whip out of Increase’s hands and flung it aside. The old man screamed as Jamie grasped him by the front of his collar and lifted him off the ground.

He watched, with satisfaction, as the viper began to die, his own collar a hangman’s noose.

Jamie heard Reeve shout at him, but the sound seemed to come from far away. He dismissed it, caring about nothing except this vengeance that he craved from the very core of his being.

Bliss gave a hoarse shriek and struggled violently against the bonds that she had tolerated until that moment. Jamie was killing Increase Pipher by inches, and in her mind she saw her husband dangling at the end of a rope as punishment for the murder.

“Jamie, no!” she screamed. “No!”

He was deaf to her words, but Walter Davis wasn’t. Shamefaced, he used Jamie’s bloody knife, wrenched from a dead man’s chest, to free her hands.