Western Stories

PART 1 The morning Roan Mercer took the escort job, he counted three reasons to say no and one reason to say yes. The three reasons were: he didn’t like protecting people who didn’t know how to protect themselves, he didn’t like riding through Graves Canyon country in late September when the shadows came early…

PART 1 The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which was the cruelest thing about it. Tuesdays were ordinary. Tuesdays meant flour deliveries, mending boots, feeding the hogs before the frost set into the barn floor. Tuesdays had no business carrying the kind of news that rewrites a person’s life. Clara Beth Whitmore was elbow-deep in…

PART 1 The morning Cade Merritt rode back into Sable Flat after three weeks on the south range, he knew something had shifted before anyone said a word. He’d been reading towns for a long time. Not the way a man read the weather, which came at you from outside — but the way a…

PART 1 The boots stopped. That was what Lan noticed first. Not the voice, not the face — the boots. She had learned to read people by their footwear before she could read their faces, because faces could be arranged, but boots could not. These boots stopped in the gravel in front of the hardware…

PART 1 The Greer place was the kind of farm that told you everything before you reached the door. Colt Rafferty had been reading properties for twenty years — first as a hired hand moving from operation to operation across Texas and New Mexico, then as the owner of his own forty acres outside of…

PART 1 The horse knew before Gideon did. He was working the south gate hinge — a simple job, the kind that required both hands and no mind, which was the only kind of work he’d been interested in for the better part of eight years — when his roan mare Petra swung her head…

PART 1 The crowd had gathered to watch her fail. Nora Fenn understood this by the time she was halfway through reading her advertisement aloud, standing on the raised platform outside Garfield’s Hotel on the main street of Caldwell, Kansas, in the October wind. She was thirty-four years old. She was a full-figured woman with…

PART 1 The crowd had been at it for forty minutes. Lena Voss counted time by the cold. Each minute in January in Creston Pass had a specific physical quality — the way it worked into the gaps between your collar and your jaw, the way your fingers went from painful to numb to absent…

PART 1 The mare was the one who found her. Tess was a big sorrel quarter horse, sixteen hands, not young anymore, and she had opinions about the world that she communicated through her ears. Right now both ears were pitched hard forward, her nostrils working at something Gideon Cross couldn’t yet smell, and she…

PART 1 The eating house on Porter Street didn’t have a sign. It had had one once, years ago — a painted board over the door that said Harrow’s Kitchen in black letters — but the board had come down in a windstorm the winter of 1877 and Jonas Harrow had never replaced it. People…