Western
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The Last Empty Star
Mick sat by the small stone hearth and watched the fire die. He reached up and touched the left side of his heavy wool coat. His fingers found four tiny, ragged holes in the fabric. That was where his silver star used to pin. Now, there was only the ghost of it. He had spent…
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THE WEIGHT OF THE LEDGER
Mick sat on the porch and watched the dust. It rose like a brown ghost two miles off. He knew that ghost. It was the sound of twelve horses and the heavy boots of men who got paid to break things. His hands shook. He pressed them against his thighs. He felt the cold iron…
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The Star in the Bitter Cold
My dad Cade had a heart like a rusted lock. It took a lot of grease and a big heavy key to get it to turn. He lived way up on the High Peaks because he felt like a failure. He used to be the Marshal, the man with the silver star, until a bunch…
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The Rust on the Star
People talk about the old days like they were written in a book of laws. They think the West was a place where things were either right or they were wrong. But I have seen the way time eats at a man. I have seen how a piece of tin can be a heavy weight…
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The Sound of the Tall Grass
I haven’t slept in three days. Every time I close my eyes, I hear the sound of the wind moving through the dry weeds. It sounds like a knife sliding out of a leather sheath. I look at my hands and they won’t stop shaking. It isn’t just the age or the whiskey I quit…
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The Teeth of the Valley
The well was the first place I looked. It was also the last place I wanted to find him. My brother Troy was not a small man. He was built like an oak tree: thick, sturdy, and hard to break. But when I pulled him up from the dark water, he was folded like a…
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The Sweetness of the Well
The history books usually talk about the big things. They talk about the wars over gold or the iron rails that cut the prairie in half. They do not talk much about Artie. Artie was a man who had lost his shine long before he arrived at the creek. He used to wear a marshal’s…
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The Debt, the Dirt, and the Dying Man
Leo was seventy years old and smelled like a wet dog that had been rolled in tobacco. He sat on the porch of the ranch house: a building that was mostly held together by spiderwebs and stubbornness. In his hand, he held a piece of paper from the bank. It was yellow and crinkled. It…
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The Iron in the Ice
Saul watched the way the ice buckled under the sled runners. It was a simple matter of pressure. Two hundred pounds of wood and gear: plus the weight of a dying man’s secrets: spread across four inches of steel. The math did not look good. The mountain was a forty degree tilt of pure white…
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THE COPPER TASTE OF FEAR
I am not a good man. If I were, I would have died ten years ago instead of Mary. I let my badge get in the way of my brain, and now she is in the dirt. My daughter, Piper, does not even look at me when she passes the salt. She has her mother’s…