Frontier Saloon

The bitter wind howled across the Dakota flats, carrying with it the stinging bite of late-autumn frost and the cold, mocking laughter of the townsfolk. A cold hearth can freeze the fingers, but it was the public cruelty that froze Maeve O’Connor's soul as she stood shivering in the middle of the mercantile porch, clutching a torn ledger to her chest like a shield against the world. "You're a clumsy, worthless charity case, Maeve," rasped Silas Vance, his face red with whiskey and unbridled malice as he hurled a basket of bruised apples across the planked floor. "You eat the town’s flour, you live in the church cellar, and you can't even balance a simple column of figures without losing two dollars. Get out of my sight before I have the sheriff run you out of Pine Ridge for vagrancy!" Maeve’s fingers trembled against the …

Shadows Fall Over the Black-Horse Ranch Where Secrets Breathe Beneath the Floorboards Rose Walsh felt the splintered wood of the courthouse auction block biting into her bare soles as the auctioneer’s gavel cracked down like a whip, signaling that her oldest sister, Maggie, was officially gone. Fifty dollars. That was the exact price set for all twenty-two years of Maggie’s life, handed over by a cattleman from the territory north whose face nobody in Mesquite Bend recognized. Rose stood rigidly at the tail end of the line of remaining girls, feeling the brutal August sun press into her scalp like a hot iron, her lungs choked with the familiar, sickening stench of dry dust, cheap whiskey, and nervous sweat. Four girls gone already. One left. Somewhere out there in the sea of bearded men, tobacco chewers, and land speculators, a stranger was calculating the coin …