Western Stories

PART 1 Dusty Springs, Colorado Territory. Summer 1873. Emma Hartley’s hand closed around the handle of that knife the moment Vernon McCrae’s fingers touched her wrist. Her whole body was shaking — not from fear, not anymore, but from something harder. Something that had been building inside her chest for three long years behind that…

PART 1 Coulter Flats, Texas. Autumn 1887. I had her letter half memorized by the time the eastbound pulled into Coulter Flats. Steady disposition. Plain features, no vanity about it. Capable with a kitchen and not averse to hard work. I’d read those lines so many times they’d worn grooves. I wasn’t a romantic man….

PART 1 The prairie was burning the way Wyoming always burned in July — slow, merciless, the kind of heat that pressed down on a man’s shoulders like a hand trying to push him into the ground. Jack Harper had been riding since before sunup, checking the eastern fence line along the lower pasture, and…

PART 1 Yuma, Arizona Territory. Summer 1883. The stage coach to Tucson left Yuma at half past six in the morning, and Martha Whitmore had been awake since four. She’d spent the pre-dawn hours in her small room at the Yuma boarding house, refolding the same three dresses, checking the same leather satchel for the…

PART 1 Blackthorne Ridge, Frontier Territory. October 1882. The morning came in gray and cold, the kind of October cold that settled into the bones before a person even stepped off the porch. Miriam Hail was already awake when the light was still just a thin line at the edge of the sky. She dressed…

PART 1 Black Hollow, Montana Territory. Spring 1880. The wagon rolled into Black Hollow on a Tuesday morning, which meant most of the town had nothing better to do than watch it arrive. A wide, flat-bedded thing pulled by two draft horses that looked like they had been on the road longer than they had…

PART 1 Pahrump, Nevada Territory. September 1878. Kellen Parker had written forty-three letters before she said yes. He had read her last reply so many times the paper had gone soft at the folds. I am 18, healthy, and willing to make a good life. That was all. Eight words he had built a future…

PART 1 Frost bit through the thin, rotted leather of Norah’s boots. But the heavy, intoxicating smell of burnt sugar, roasted pecans, and fresh yeast pulling from Omali’s bakery felt like a physical hand dragging her forward. She didn’t want to be a thief. She just wanted the wet, rattling cough in her little sister’s…

PART 1 Martha Kellerman was standing at the kitchen window with a dish towel in her hands. Not drying anything. Just holding it, the way hands hold things when they need somewhere to be while the eyes are busy elsewhere. And what her eyes were busy with, that Tuesday afternoon, was a man on a…