Page 1 of 16
A young telegraph operator in a dusty frontier town overhears a coded plot to rob a train and kidnap a boy. With a veteran cowboy, a clever tinkerer, and a quiet desert guide, she follows the wires into the hills. In the standoff that follows, courage and wit prove louder than any gunshot.
At dawn the town was a quiet scrape of tin signs and wind. The telegraph office faced the single street, its windows fogged by coffee steam and the night's cool. Lin Mei had already rolled up the front canvas flap and set a pot on the iron stove. Her sleeves were tight at her wrists, buttoned to keep the dust out. The brass key under her fingers felt warm from practice. She tapped a short greeting to Lone Cactus to wake the line.
Lone Cactus replied with a lazy tick-tick that made her smile. “Morning,” she said aloud, though no one was there to hear it. Jackrabbits flashed across the road and the sky was pale blue, bleached of any moisture. The town’s water tower threw a long skeletal shadow across the road.
Bootsteps thumped outside. Isaiah Cole ducked through the doorway with a bag of mail in one big, careful hand. He had a gray beard trimmed to the line of his jaw and wore a faded cavalry coat in the mornings when the sun hadn’t turned mean yet. “You beat the light again,” he said.
“Messages don’t sleep,” Lin Mei answered. She poured him coffee into a tin cup with a dent by the lip. He stood holding it as if it might run away. He never sat until she told him to. “Anything from the west?”
“Just road dust and coyotes with plenty to say.” He sniffed the steam. “Stage rolled late last night. Sheriff Dunn walked a circle under the stars for a while. He looked like a man counting beans that weren’t there.”
The telegraph rasped at her elbow. Lin Mei’s hand moved without looking, pencil ready. “HALDEN—WHEELS—DELAYED—HOLD.” She scribbled it, set it aside for Marty at the livery. Then: a clean, quick train heartbeat from the railroad’s private wire, a sound lower than town traffic. She wasn’t supposed to touch that wire. Her ears felt it more than her fingers, like a vibration under the floorboards.
“Something wrong?” Isaiah asked.
She shook her head, but her pulse had picked up. “Company business,” she said. “You know how they get.” She pushed his mailbag across the counter. “I saved you a biscuit.”
“I’ll trade you gossip,” he said, eyes amused. “Harlan’s crew hauled crates to the yard before dawn. Smelled like oil and trouble.”