Spring at San Miguel Wells

The roan mare took the grade into San Miguel Wells at an easy jog, ears flicking to the buzz of cicadas and the faint jitter of the telegraph wire singing in the wind. Nora Hart let the reins lie slack against Bluebird’s neck and lifted her hat brim with a dust-gloved knuckle. The air smelled like hot iron and creosote, sharpened by the memory of a storm that had spent itself two nights prior. By late afternoon the town lay ahead, a clutch of false fronts and adobe shoulders squinting under a broad, pitiless sky.

She had not been back west of the Arkansas since the war. The land here was the same and not the same—stony rises, pale grass, yucca thrusting like bayonets, and horizon for days. Her saddlebags clinked with tools: a rasp, nippers, a driving hammer wrapped in oiled canvas. She knew iron and hoof better than she knew most people. It paid steady, and she took comfort in the clean geometry of a horse’s foot, in the calm care of setting a shoe true.

Bluebird blew, interested. A boy in a wide shirt raced a stray chicken across the street. At the far end, the livery waited, doors open like a jaw. A dog sprawled in the shade, tail thumping. Two men rashed a saw through some cottonwood planks and never paused. Above, a hawk made a lazy ellipse, looking for foolish prairie dogs.

The first thing Nora noticed as she halted was the poster tacked to a cracked plank beside the saloon doors. The paper had flour paste streaks, like tears dried in the heat. WANTED was stamped thick as an accusation. Beneath the black block letters, a drawing pulled her heart into a hard knot. Jesse Hart. The likeness was poor—eyes wrong, mouth too sharp—but the line of the jaw was her father’s. Her brother’s name leapt at her as if it had teeth. Stage robbery, two miles east of Painted Arroyo. Reward, two hundred dollars. See Sheriff Caldwell.

“Ma’am?” The liveryman had a towel over one shoulder and nails between his lips. “She hot?”

“She’s easy,” Nora said, voice low. She dismounted and patted Bluebird’s shoulder. “Clean stall, little mash if you got it. And…water fresh.”

“Plenty,” he said, taking the reins. His eyes flicked from her belt knife to the poster and back again. He didn’t ask. Folks out here made their inquiries with their eyebrows.

Inside the dim cool of the livery, Nora slid her saddlebags free. Iron had a smell like rain when it warmed. She laid her tools on a bench by habit, fingertips straightening the hammer’s head, the nippers’ hinge. Her throat went tight, and she swallowed. Jesse had been foolhardy as any nineteen-year-old, quick to brag and quicker to defend friends who didn’t deserve defending. But he wasn’t a robber.

She crossed the street to the poster again and read every line, as if repetition could turn the letters into nonsense. Foot traffic washed around her—two ranch hands laughing, a woman with a string bag of beans, a peddler with a tray of needles and ribbon. A piano thumped inside the saloon, bleak and cheerful at once. She untacked the corner of the poster from the wood with a fingernail and folded a square of it into her pocket.

The heat pressed down like a hand. She tilted her hat to a better angle and walked to the sheriff’s office.