Best Stories

Chapter 1 Seven times Clara Vansen stood before the matrimonial board of Black Hollow, humiliated. Seven times a respectable man looked at her fire-scarred hands and rigid spine, then quickly walked away. Out here a woman without a husband was a liability. They called her unmarriageable, ruined, cursed by bad luck — until a heavy…

Chapter 1 She had crossed four states in a borrowed dress to marry a man who took one look at her and said no, thank you. Nora Pell stood on the platform of Redstone Pass with her one good travel bag and thirty-one dollars to her name, while the man who had sent for her…

Chapter 1 She hit the mud face first, and not one soul in Red Creek moved to help her. Nora Dawes, daughter of the finest ranching family in Garfield County, lay broken in the town square while Mayor Victor Rinaldi’s men stood over her with chains and a document she was being forced to sign….

Chapter 1 Eleanor Calder knew exactly how much space disgrace required. At the First Methodist harvest supper in Calder Falls, Colorado, in the autumn of 1879, it required five feet of empty bench between her and the nearest respectable woman. It required a chipped plate, a dull spoon, and a serving of baked beans left…

Chapter 1 The morning Anna Cole arrived in the Texas Panhandle, the wind was not blowing so much as laying its whole palm against the world and shoving. It pressed her skirts flat to her legs, worried dust into the seams of her gloves, and pulled loose strands of hair from beneath the brim of…

Chapter 1 The gunshot stopped the piano so sharply that the last note seemed to hang by itself in the smoky air. Clara Whitfield did not understand at first that she had been shot. She understood the silence. She understood the sudden hard stare of every miner in the Silver Horn. She understood Garrett Pruitt…

Chapter 1 Nine days after Red Valley Timber Camp cast Martha Bell out as a thief, the blizzard was still trying to finish the work. Wind struck Miller Creek with a sound like axes against a locked door. Snow covered the logging road, buried the low fences, filled the wagon ruts, and climbed the walls…

Chapter 1 The letter reached Ethan Cole on a Tuesday morning in May, carried over thirty miles of dry Montana road by a rider whose horse looked as if it had outrun judgment itself. Ethan was mending a split rail at the south pasture when he saw Mrs. Carroll crossing the field with her skirts…

Chapter 1 The last poker hand at the Copper Kettle did not end with coins. It ended with a folded deed, a water-stained ranch map, and an old man who stared at the table as if the cards had reached up and struck him across the mouth. Marcus Thorne sat very still while the saloon…

Chapter 1 The wind came down from the Wind River peaks like judgment, rattling the loose boards of the cabin until Eveina thought the whole miserable place might tear loose and scatter across the Wyoming snow. She had been in pain since before dawn. By nightfall, the one-room cabin outside the mining camp of Red…