The morning I found Nia bound across the railroad tracks. The train was already thundering down through the valley, and I had only moments to decide whether I would let an innocent woman die or become the man I had sworn to bury forever. My name is Wade Coulter. For years, that name carried weight across the sunscorched towns of the American West. There was a time when drunks lowered their voices whenever I pushed through a saloon's swinging doors, and hired guns pretended not to notice me, even as their fingers hovered beside their revolvers.
I wore the badge of a US marshal, kept a Winchester strapped to my saddle, and carried the foolish belief that one honest man could hold back evil if he was fast enough with a gun. Then Rose Coulter died. And when I lowered my wife into the ground, I buried the marshall with her. At least that was what I told myself for the next 5 years. My son, Eli Coulter, had gone east to study law.
He said he wanted to fight for justice without leaving a trail of graves behind him. Maybe the boy had grown wiser than his father. I stayed behind in an aging cabin surrounded by sagging fences, weary horses, and a mule meaner than any frontier judge I had ever faced. By daylight, I repaired whatever the years had broken. At night, I sat alone beside the fire, listening to the wind strike the walls as though it carried the voices of men I had failed and people I could never bring back.
The town's folk said I had finally found peace. They were wrong. A man can keep breathing for years after something inside him has already died. Before sunrise that morning, I rode out to inspect the irrigation ditch along the edge of my property. A thin golden glow was beginning to rise behind the hills.
The air carried the dry scent of the frontier. Dust, sagebrush, and wood smoke drifting from some distant camp. Everything looked as ordinary and lifeless as it had the day before. Then a scream tore the dawn apart. It was not a cry born from fear.
It was a cry of fury, raw, fierce, defiant. Whoever made that sound was not begging for mercy. She was cursing the men who believed they had the right to erase her from the earth. My fingers tightened around the res. And here is the truth no respectable man would willingly admit.
I considered riding away. I thought about returning to my cabin, bolting the door, brewing a pot of coffee, and convincing myself that the wind had played a cruel trick on me. I told myself I had already sacrificed enough for the troubles of strangers. The rusted badge beneath my coat owed me nothing, and after everything the world had taken, I owed the world even less. My horse carried me several paces toward home.
Then he stopped. He ignored the pull of the res and refused the pressure of my heel. He planted all four hooves in the hard earth and snorted as though that stubborn animal possessed more conscience than the man sitting in the saddle. Damn you, I whispered. To this day, I cannot say whether I meant the horse, the Almighty, or myself.
I turned the animal around and urged him up the ridge. When I reached the crest, I saw the black rails of the Red Canyon Railroad cutting through Apache Country like a fresh wound carved into the land. The iron gleamed beneath the first light of morning. Far down the valley, a dark pillar of smoke marked the approaching locomotive. A roaring load of timber, steel, and certain death, and stretched across the tracks like a sacrifice offered to some iron beast, was a woman.
Nia, I did not know her name yet, but her eyes marked me before I could draw another breath. Thick hemp rope held her wrists and ankles against the wooden ties. The bindings had been pulled so tightly that her skin had split from struggling. Her Apache buckskin dress was torn along one shoulder and stained with dark dust and dried blood. Her hair hung wild around her battered face, and both her cheek and lips were bruised.
But she was not broken. That was the first thing I understood about her. She did not weep. She did not plead. She refused even to look at the men who had left her there.
Instead, she stared straight toward the oncoming train as if she wanted that great iron machine to know that it could crush her body, but would never witness her fear. About 30 yards away, three men warmed coffee over a small fire while passing a bottle between them. They laughed as if watching a woman die were nothing more than Saturday night entertainment. Hank Dodd was the largest of the three, a broad bearded brute with a belly straining against his gun belt. Finn Ror was thin, restless, and nervous, forever brushing his fingers against the grip of his pistol.