Bounty Pursuit

The afternoon wind howling across the jagged ridges of Mill Haven carried the scent of approaching winter and the unmistakable copper tang of old blood. Eliza stood frozen on the wide porch of the ranch house, her fingers locked around the smooth wooden banister as the distant rumble of wagon wheels signaled an arrival she had spent months praying would never come. The morning Eliza Thornfield left Dry Creek, not one person came to say goodbye. Behind her, the farmhouse stood dark and silent against the gray dawn sky. Her brothers, Marcus and Kale, were still sleeping off the cheap whiskey they had drunk while celebrating the fact that they were finally getting rid of their household burden. The problem was Eliza. She carried one thin canvas bag containing nearly everything she owned in the world and walked toward the dirt road without looking back …

The heavy iron door of the eastbound passenger car slammed shut with a finality that echoed off the weathered pine planks of the station, leaving her standing alone in a cloud of acrid coal smoke and freezing wind. Twelve hundred miles of rattling tracks had brought her to the edge of the world, only to deliver her into a rejection sharper than the mountain air. Julia May Crowley stood frozen on the desolate Wyoming platform as the steam hissed away, her gloved fingers gripping the worn fabric of her carpet bag so tightly her knuckles ached beneath the wool. She had spent fifty-two years learning how to survive the quiet cruelties of the world, but nothing in her long, solitary life had prepared her for the dismissive sweep of Harland Pike's eyes. The moment he had stepped out from beneath the shade of the depot …

The Blood Stained the Floorboards Before He Even Read the Telegraph The coffee burned before dawn, and Nola Vance took it as a warning she should have listened to. She stood in the narrow kitchen of the St. Louis staging house, watching greasy smoke curl from the blackened spout of a pot that had seen better decades. Around her, younger, prettier women packed their trunks for journeys west—the kind of women lonely cattlemen and homesteaders actually requested. At forty-three, Nola possessed none of their fresh blooms. Her hands were scarred with grease and alkali, her eyes carried the perpetual gray haze of too many sleepless nights, and her face had survived enough hardship to strip away any lingering illusions that the world might be gentle. Mrs. Talbott rustled into the doorway, her skirts stiff with starch and disapproval, holding a damp yellow telegram that smelled …

When Every Silence Hides a Secret and Every Shadow Has a Past The bitter draft slipping through the warped floorboards carried the heavy, metallic stench of burning sage and unwashed wool, but it was the sudden, dead silence of the front room that made the hairs on the back of Nolan Vance’s neck stand straight up. He did not drop the iron skillet he was cleaning, nor did he rush out from the dark, grease-smudged kitchen, because forty-three years of surviving barroom brawls and desolate Wyoming winters had taught him that panic was a luxury for the lucky. Instead, Nolan wiped his calloused palms deliberately on his canvas trousers, his tired eyes narrowing as he listened to the distinct, hollow click of a rifle hammer being drawn back in the hallway. The mail-order arrangement had been a mistake from the very first telegram, but as …