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A young courier in a dusty railroad town chases stolen payroll and medicine, uncovers a conspiracy tied to a powerful railroad magnate, and learns how courage, cleverness, and a small band of allies can turn a ledger into justice.
June Laramie learned the map of Arroyo Blanco by smell long before she could read the neat letters on a government ledger. Mornings arrived as a grey wash of coffee steam and hot iron; afternoons tasted of sunbaked sage and leather; evenings settled with the slow, clean scent of cedar from the carpenter’s shed. Houses lay squat along the arroyo like a set of weathered teeth, windows blinked under canvas awnings, and the town’s single street ran like a spine through everything: saloon, general store, post, blacksmith, church. June could walk that spine with her eyes shut and deliver a parcel by memory — a tin of quinine to Mrs. Alvarez’s back porch, a spool of copper wire to the telegraphman, a letter folded neatly for the priest. She did it all before the third bell.
She met the world on the back of Penny. Penny was no ordinary mule; she was half-mule, half-iron, patched and retrofitted with a small steam-driven contraption that whined under a blanket of harness leather. June’s father had welded the first plates himself, calling the machine a mercy against the long washes that chewed axle and pride alike. Penny’s breath smelled faintly of oil and the dried wildflowers June tucked into the bridle. When she nudged Penny, the rig answered without complaint, a small plume of steam kissing the dusty air.
Toby, her brother, was the shape that kept June’s days tight and precise. He was all elbows and talk, fourteen with hands always stained by machine grease or flour from the bakery where he’d apprenticed. Toby’s cough had started last month — a crackle in his chest that made him wake in the night and rub his side with the flat of his palm. The medicines came from town or farther; they arrived at the post in a battered trunk with a brass label and a promise. The mail was how families in Arroyo Blanco held together. Without it, the town frayed.
On the day the mailbox arrived with nothing but a folded scrap of paper and a raw look in Marshal Hargrove’s eyes, June was already halfway down Main, Penny’s hooves ringing fast against packed dirt. The stagecoach had not come in the hour before dawn. At the livery they said the driver had been robbed. A sack of payroll gone, and a crate stamped MEDICINE — all emptied from the coach and left in the dust like a wound. June tasted copper in her mouth, a small, sharp immediacy like the first bright note of an alarm. She tied Penny to a post and kept her hand on the mule’s flank while she listened to the men whisper: the railroad had been pushing west, men with dark hats and ledger books, a promise of work couched in thin smiles. No one wanted to say the word 'sabotage' out loud.