Chapter 1 - The Digging of the Hollow
Mercy Whitcomb stood up in the frozen creek bed, her bloody palm wrapped tight in her petticoat strip.
She looked at the crumpled letter in her pocket, then at the sky. A gray curtain of snow was descending from the north, blurring the ragged edges of the prairie. Temperature was dropping fast—fast enough to freeze a person’s blood in their veins within an hour if they were caught out in the open wind.
Silas had left her the broken Conestoga wagon, but a wooden wagon with a torn canvas top was nothing more than an elevated box for the wind to whistle through. It would become a coffin before midnight.
Mercy looked at the dirt bank of the dry creek cut.
The bank was six feet tall, formed of hard, dark clay mixed with river gravel and root systems. It was protected from the north wind by a thick natural overhang of red rock and dead brush.
"He thinks I'm going to freeze on top of his boards," Mercy whispered into the rising wind. Her voice was no longer a sob. It was a cold, sharp blade. "He thinks I'm going to lie down and die like a sick cow."
She grabbed the broken iron wagon axle—a four-foot bar of heavy, forged iron—and swung it with all the strength in her broad shoulders into the clay wall.
THUD.
The iron bit four inches into the earth. Dirt and small stones showered down over her boots.
Mercy pulled the bar free and struck again. And again. And again.
She didn't dig down; she dug in.
She carved a low, arched cave into the face of the clay bank beneath the natural rock overhang. She swung the iron axle like an axe, breaking through hardpan, stone, and ancient roots. Her palms bled, her arms burned with a agony that made her teeth ache, but every blow was driven by the image of Silas Whitcomb’s narrow, dismissive face as he rode away on Barnaby.
“A woman your size will sink us both.”
"I'll sink you into the ground, Silas," she gasped, her breath blooming in white clouds as she hurled the iron bar into the wall again.
By nightfall, the blizzard hit the ravine.
The wind roared across the open prairie above like a freight train, driving millions of needle-sharp snow particles across the plains. But eight feet inside the dirt bank, Mercy was sitting in total darkness, wrapped in her heavy wool blanket, breathing the damp, cool smell of fresh earth.
She had carved a deep dugout—six feet wide, eight feet deep, with a low ceiling that held in the ambient heat of the ground.
She had dragged the heavy canvas top from the broken wagon and staked it tightly across the entrance, leaving only a tiny slit for air. Inside, she had hauled the wooden floorboards from the wagon bed to create a dry platform off the frozen dirt.
She was cold, hungry, and exhausted beyond human measure. But as she listened to the winter howling harmlessly outside her earthen shelter, Mercy Whitcomb felt a strange, quiet spark ignite in her chest.
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She had built a house with her own blood.
And she was still alive.
