The Telegraph Key

At dawn the wire began to chatter like a nervous bird, little taps that ran along the counter and into Eliza Hart’s fingertips. The telegraph office at Las Piedras was a one-room box beside the depot, whitewashed and peeling where the sun bit the hardest. Dust sifted through the door seam and laid a neat line across the floorboards. Eliza kept a small broom near the stool, and between messages she swept in quiet, brisk strokes, as if she could sweep the desert back to the horizon.

“Coffee,” Maria Santos said, shoulder nudging the door, elbow steadying a pot and two tin cups. She was short and quick, with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and a grin that could cut or bless. “Brown as a saddle and twice as strong.”

Eliza smiled and lifted the sounder’s lever to pause the clicks. “I’ll take both. Anything to sweeten your morning?”

Maria poured, then leaned her hip on the desk. “Just the sound of that tapping. Means we’re not alone out here.”

They drank in easy silence. Through the open window, the town stretched in a line: the livery’s timber ribs, the clapboard hotel, the Iglesia Santa Luz with a bell that rang irregularly, and beyond that the rippling suggestion of the territory itself, dun and gold and indigo where the buttes began. Eliza listened to wind and wire together and breathed steam from the tin cup.

Jonah Pike rang his spurs on the step and filled the doorway, tall, freckled, and young enough that the badge seemed to weigh him forward. “Ladies.” He touched two fingers to his hat brim. “Train’s due at ten, and I’d bet my last nickel Mr. Mercer’s on it.”

Maria’s grin thinned. “Clay Mercer. He can turn my coffee to vinegar from a mile away.”

Eliza felt her jaw tighten at the name. The cattle man had brought coin to Las Piedras. He had also brought men who laughed while their boots were still dusty from someone else’s land. “He doesn’t take the back way when there’s a main street,” she said. “He’ll want to be seen.”

The sounder stirred. Eliza set down the cup, put her fingers to the key, and read with her head bowed. A freight delay east of San Marcial. A county notice about water rights to be certified next week in Santa Dalia. Another chatter, faster, the rhythm off, like a heartbeat in a fever. She wrote as she listened, pencil scudding on the page: SD–urgent–auction of Coyote Spring parcel. Present title required or parcel forfeit.

Coyote Spring. The only water worth the torment of staying through August. The town drank it, baptized in it, traded by it. Maria’s eyes flicked, quick and fierce. “Present title? We have title.”

Jonah rubbed his neck. “Sheriff Caldwell says the original deed’s in Santa Dalia. Safe and sound. But safe’s a strange word lately.”

The key clicked in stutters. Eliza frowned. It wasn’t a line she knew. It had pauses where there should be none and a slant to the letters—someone’s hand, someone with careless habits. She wrote, counted, rewrote. A name fell out of it like a bone from a stew: Mercer.