Best Stories

PART 1 Three hard knocks struck the door, sharp and sudden as gunshots in the dark. Clara Whitmore froze where she stood, one hand wrapped around a wooden spoon, the other steadying the iron pot hanging over her fire. Outside, the wind screamed across the Wyoming ridge, hurling snow against the walls in thick white…

PART 1 The dust came before the wagon did. Hattie Drummond watched it rise over the ridge of Caldwell Flats like something exhaling — slow, yellow-brown, indifferent to whether the town wanted it or not. She stood at the edge of Main Street with a carpet bag at her feet and her coat buttoned wrong,…

 For eleven years, Cedar Hollow had been certain of exactly one thing: no woman would ever marry Eli Brennan, not with half his face carved away by a fire that had taken everything else from him too. Then a letter went east, a stagecoach came west, and a woman named Margaret Sullivan stepped down onto…

They called her Thorn’s Weed, the children of that dusty Wyoming town, and held their noses when she passed — a six-year-old ghost living in a house gone hollow with two years of her father’s grief. Jacob Thorne knew it was his fault and didn’t know how to fix it, so he did the only…

For eleven years, Amos Whitaker’s gate had stayed shut and his door had stayed quiet, and the whole of Dunore Gap had long since decided what that meant about the man behind it. Then, on a gray October evening, three small taps came low on his door — no higher than a child’s knee —…

Ida Sorrel had thirty-one cents in her coat pocket, three silent children in the wagon behind her, and a notice so old the ink had gone the color of dead straw. She told herself it was simple — knock on a door, ask for work, feed her children through winter. It was simple, right up…

Ellen Marsh had promised herself she would not cry, not in front of the whole town of Rimrock, not with her wrists roped raw and Otis Cain’s hired man already coiling the whip back for the first swing. She had made her peace with the pain. What she had not made peace with was the…

She had not eaten in a day and a half, and still she stood between the rancher’s lantern and her sleeping children like she meant to take the light in her bare hands if she had to. Josiah Vane had every right to put them back out on the road before the sun cleared the…

PART 1 The cold had no mercy in it. It drove Nell Carver into the ditch before she even saw the fence post, and she caught herself with both hands in the snow, her palms burning through the thin wool of her gloves, and pushed herself upright before her knees could sink any deeper. The…

PART 1 I rode into Riddle Creek on the second of December with a list of winter supplies and no intention of talking to a living soul I didn’t have to. Six years alone on the Greystone range does that to a man. Files him down to nothing but function. Cattle. Fence line. Four walls….