Western Stories

PART 1 Marta Bauer did not ask for a ride. She did not ask for sympathy, or charity, or the particular brand of pity that people offered before they found a reason not to help. She had a suitcase with a broken clasp held shut with twine, twenty-two dollars and some change, and a notice…

PART 1 The latch was the thing that stopped him. He had his hand on it, half through the motion of lifting it and slipping inside, when the rust of the thing squealed in the dark so loud he felt it in his back teeth. He froze with his fingers still on the iron. He…

PART 1 The riders came up from the creek road with the slow official rhythm that told Maren Briggs everything she needed to know before she saw their faces. She was at the well, and she heard the hoofbeats and stilled her hands on the rope. Men bringing news came fast. Men asking for help…

PART 1 The first thing Eli Mace heard inside the stable was not his horse settling or the wind through the boards. It was the sound of someone trying not to breathe. He stopped with the lantern held at shoulder height. The storm had been building since the ridge, and by the time he had…

PART 1 The scream came off the canyon wall like something thrown. Caleb Fenn heard it before he saw what made it — a tearing, human sound that did not belong to any animal he knew. He had been descending the south trail from his cabin above Irongate Pass for the first time in three…

PART 1 The first sound Gideon Cross heard inside his new barn was not an animal. It was a woman. “Please,” the voice came from the dark, barely above a breath. “I’ll work. I won’t cause trouble. Just don’t send me back.” Gideon had one hand on his Remington and the other on the door….

PART 1 The loan officer’s name was on a plastic nameplate on his desk, but I didn’t need to read it. I had seen his face before — at the co-op, at the county planning office, at every counter in every building where a twenty-year-old woman walks in alone and the room makes its assessment…

PART 1 Three weeks before Nora Vance stepped off the train at Dry Fork Station, a freight agent in Kansas City had said something she could not shake. She had been settling her trunk onto the baggage scale, running the numbers in her head the way she always ran numbers — the cost of the…

PART 1 The morning came in gray and still, the particular stillness of early October in high country when winter was making its intentions known before it arrived. Lena Marsh was already awake when the light was still nothing but a pale suggestion at the edge of the sky. She dressed in the dark —…

PART 1 The woman on the porch had a rifle aimed at the center of his chest, and she did not look like she was doing it for effect. Nate Calloway pulled his horse to a stop at the edge of the property line and kept his hands visible. He had been in enough tight…