Wild West Outlaw

The first thing Mara Bell did in Mercy Hollow was step off the train with blood on her sleeve and ask the biggest man in town whether he was afraid of women. Every conversation on the platform died at once. The noon train had come screaming out of the Colorado dust, coughing steam into a sky as pale as bone. Men in canvas coats shaded their eyes. Women clutched baskets and children. The stationmaster, Mr. Pike, had been halfway through shouting about mail sacks when Mara Bell appeared in the doorway of the passenger car. She was not the woman anyone expected. Mercy Hollow had been whispering for two months that Abel Stone, the giant of Wolfjaw Mountain, had finally ordered himself a bride. They said he was six feet ten, though some swore he was seven if you counted the hat. They said his …

The dry-land flume would hold no water until the high arroyo broke. That was the wager the town council had laughed at when Orrin Prescott brought his surveyor’s rod into the dusty square of Tombstone’s northern fringe. Dorothea Sutherland scraped the rim of her galvanized bucket against the inner crust of the holding tank, listening for the hollow ring that signaled empty clay. The desert air of the Arizona washes was so dry it cracked the skin across her knuckles, leaving fine lines that bled whenever she hauled the heavy wet-leather ropes over the juniper block. Around her, the scrub cedar stood like gray skeletons under a sun that had baked the valley floor until it split into jagged polygons. "You're wasting good sweat on a dry bed, Miss Sutherland," Slocum drawled, leaning his broad frame against the corner of the livery board. His vest …

The dry-land wind outside the Dunore general store didn’t just howl; it stripped the paint off the sign and left the wood weeping sap, but inside, the air smelled of dead mice, rancid suet, and the kind of quiet desperation that could rot a man’s boots from the inside out. The twenty-year-old sourdough starter packed inside Nell Whitaker’s cracked ceramic crock was still alive, but barely—surviving on a diet of stale flour water and stubbornness, much like the twenty-man crew at Red Willow Ranch who were currently sharpening their skinning knives with murder in their eyes. There was no time for pleasantries, no gentle introduction to the alkali flats of Wyoming, and no mercy from the sixty-eight-dollar bank note waiting like a hangman’s knot with Caleb Mercer’s name on it. "This is what you call food?" The plate hit the rough-hewn pine of the bunkhouse …