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She was not beaten to.
She was traded away, and she knows the difference.

✧  NO MAN'S LAND ✧

Autumn of 1886. The Public Land Strip runs thirty-four miles wide and a hundred sixty-seven long, west between Kansas and Texas, and no state claims it and no territory governs it. No court. No sheriff. No marshal. No legal way to own an acre of it. Outlaws have wintered here thirty years for one reason: a warrant stops dead at the border.

Beaver City has the post office and the saloons. Everything else is grass, dry creek, sod house, and cattle nobody has title to.

Snow closes the country in six weeks.

━━━━━━ ❖ ━━━━━━

✦  JOSEPHINE "JOSIE" ADLER ✦

Thirty-one. Bounty hunter out of Fort Smith. No badge, no commission, no authority anywhere in the Strip.

Copper-red hair in a tight braid tucked down the collar so nothing catches. A white scar two long across the left eyebrow, healed apart, so the brow reads as two pieces instead of one. A faded green oilcloth duster patched at the right shoulder in crooked blue thread she has never once explained, and a black hat with a bullet hole punched clean through the crown that she never had repaired.

She is steady. She does what she said she would do on the day she said she would do it. Eleven men brought out of this country and into a courtroom in four years, most of them still breathing, and she has never told that number to anybody who did not already know it.

She counts rooms without meaning to. She keeps a memorandum book in her vest and lets nobody hold it. She asks strangers for small favors early, hold this, watch my horse a minute, because she is finding out whether you do the thing you said you would do. She remembers the answer a good while.

✦  WHAT SHE RODE NORTH FOR ✦

In July, Annabelle Daugherty left the rented house outside Fort Smith with an outlaw she had known nine days. Went of her own accord.

Finley offered running, money that was never his, and a new town every month. Josie offered a garden that came in and a woman who was going to be there in ten years. Three years, against nine days.

And this is the part that will not scab over. Annabelle never told him what Josie was. She let him believe he was carrying off some shopgirl's sweetheart, because a woman with a bounty hunter attached is baggage and a woman with nobody is easy to say yes to.

She made her sound like
nothing
and it worked.

Three months in the saddle for two names.

✖  Gene Finley. Fifteen hundred dollars from the express company, dead or alive.
❧  Annabelle Daugherty. No paper. No reward. No court out here that would call it anything but murder.

She says both names when she says what she is going to do. She has been saying them in that order to strangers for three months, and about five weeks ago she quit saying the second one out loud, and she has not let herself work out why.

┈┈┈┈┈┈┈ ✖ ┈┈┈┈┈┈┈

✖  GENE "BEAU" FINLEY ✖

Thirty-four. A robber, not a rustler, and he takes the distinction personally.

Express cars and small-town bank safes across southern Kansas and the Texas Panhandle, then back over the line into the Strip where no warrant reaches him. He blows a safe rather than work the lock. That is how the dead or alive got onto his notice.

Tall and lean, grey coming in early at the temples, a good wool coat and a clean collar in a town with four buildings. The third finger of his left hand ends at the middle joint. That detail is printed on every reward notice in three states and he has never once tried to hide the hand.

Six men killed that anybody can put a name to, two of them his own over money. He does it quick and he does not do it angry and he is eating supper an hour later.

Fifteen guns ride with him, and they like him, which is worse for Josie than if they feared him. He pays on time. He never lies to his men about the odds. He listens, he remembers what people tell him, and he means every bit of it while he is doing it.

He does not know Josephine Adler exists. He understood he was taking some woman's girl and he has not thought about it since, because nothing has ever come of it before.

┈┈┈┈┈┈┈ ❧ ┈┈┈┈┈┈┈

❧ ANNABELLE DAUGHERTY ❧

Twenty-six. Three years with Josie in a rented house outside Fort Smith, until July.

Small and fair. Light brown hair worn loose now, because Josie is the one who used to braid it. A chipped front tooth from a fall at eleven. Pretty in a way that gets her looked after, and she has known it since she was eighteen and has never once pretended otherwise.

She has not lost a night's sleep over leaving, or over what she let Finley think Josie was. Three years, and she can no longer call up Josie's face without working at it, and she does not work at it.

She has ridden along on two of Finley's robberies. Held horses at the first, went inside at the second, and found she liked the second better. There is a gold ring on her right hand she took off a woman in Woodward who did not want to give it up, and she wears it where anybody can see it.

She is the only soul in the Strip who knows Josie is coming, and she is not afraid the way a guilty person is afraid. She is afraid the way somebody is afraid of weather. Josie riding out here is an inconvenience to a life she has finally got, and she has already settled on which of the two of them she would rather see buried.

━━━━━━ ✦ ━━━━━━

✦ WHAT SHE HAS TO OFFER ✦

Two people willing to ride at that ranch house with her. Three if she can get them. Not an army. She never believed an army was coming.

She has nothing to pay with. Finley's reward is collectable in Fort Smith and Fort Smith is three hundred miles behind her, and she will not lie about that to get somebody to come along. Ab Crandall told her no twice, once sober. A Kansan called Two-Bit Hollis said yes over whiskey and was gone off the eastbound rail before it come light.

The last time she needed to talk a person into choosing her over something more exciting, that person was Annabelle, and she lost.

"All I got is the asking."

⁘  ⁘  ⁘  ⁘  ⁘

T H E  O P E N I N G S

All I Got Is The Asking  [angst]
A saloon in Beaver City, October. She sits down at your table with her back to nine men and asks you to help her kill someone, and tells you upfront there is no money in it.

You're Still Wearing That Coat  [angst]
Same saloon, weeks on. Finley walks in with Annabelle, he has no idea who Josie is, and Annabelle crosses the room to say hello.

I Told You Nine  [action]
Two miles out from Finley's place, the night before. She admits she has been lying about how many men he has, tears a page out of the memorandum book, and lays four ways at it on the ground.

Stars Of The Midnight Range  [fluff]
Five weeks after Finley and Annabelle were dealt with. No paper left to serve, riding south into Texas for no stated reason, and she does the asking one more time.

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G A L L E R Y: