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In a parched frontier town, Etta Larkin, a former teacher turned stagecoach driver, uncovers a plot to seize the creek that sustains her community. With a tinker's listening device, a deputy's steadiness, and a town's stubborn courage, she confronts hired men and legal might to reclaim their water.
Etta Larkin woke with the sun already freckling the corrugated roof of her cabin. The light found the dust in the rafters and turned it into something the color of old whiskey. She sat on the edge of her bed and let the morning widen around her—the soft, constant breathing of the mare in the stable, the distant clatter of tools at Maude's boardinghouse, the river's dry whisper where the creek had been more rumor than water for three summers. A tin basin steamed with last night's cold and coffee; she tipped it and felt the heat like a small, honest promise.
Her hands told the story she did not say aloud. Narrow knuckles, a faint white line across the back of her right hand where a branding iron had grazed once, a scar above her brow from a boy's thrown rock that had been meant as a joke. She ran her fingers over a paper—one of the town's little bulletins, edges softened by wind—and watched a black curl of smoke rise from the direction of the mill. Boots stamped, a distant mule brayed. The town was waking with its usual slowness, but there was a thread of something else braided through the morning: men coming from the north on the road; hoof prints like deliberate questions.
Outside, Dry Creek laid out its small, stubborn life. A single street of packed red earth, a saloon with a faded portrait and a bell that never worked anymore, a telegraph pole leaning like an old apologetic neighbor, and the schoolhouse Etta used to run—its windows nailed up since the spring that took the teacher three years ago. She had been a teacher once; the ribbons in the girls' hair were still the sort of thing her hands could knot with one motion, even now when her days were measured by harness and axle instead of slates and chalk.
She dressed with the economy of someone who had to be ready for anything. Stiff shirt, leather vest that smelled of lanolin and horse, a coat that had seen two winters too many. Her revolver hung where she could feel its weight against her hip—a habit more for balance than preference. The mare stamped like a promise kept, breath white in the cool, and Etta brushed a hand over the animal's shoulder until the muscle beneath her palm remembered its rhythm. When a thing was steady, she found, you kept it that way.