Spider mountain

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They were going to hang him, Janey realized. She could just barely see an old man lying in the back of a battered pickup truck, his arms and chest wrapped in at least fifty pounds of chain coiled from his neck down to his hips. His eyes were wide with terror. A heavily bearded fat man was trying to toss one end of a rope up over the limb of an oak tree, while a second, older man, tall and thin with a ferret-like face, was fashioning an elaborate hangman’s noose on the other end of the rope.

She’d been taking water samples on Crown Lake when she’d heard the truck laboring in the woods and climbed up to the ridge to investigate. Her Park Service Jeep was nearly two miles away around the shoreline, along with her radio. Only now she remembered the senior ranger telling them to keep their radio with them at all times. Too late now, she thought. She squinted into the late afternoon sunlight, trying to decide. There were two of them, and she was alone. Being a probationer, she had no weapon other than a pepper-spray cylinder on her work belt. But she couldn’t just squat down behind these bushes and watch them hang the old man.

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