Marshal Colt Brennan's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Marshal Colt Brennan wanted one thing: a town where families could plant roots and stop looking over their shoulders. Right now he had the opposite. For six weeks, robbers had hit the supply wagons on the road into Hailscar, one every seven days. Last week he found a split flour sack, half its load blown across the dirt. That flour was meant to feed a family a month. Now Brennan knelt at the last ambush site, and the trail died under his hands. He read the ground the way he always did. Wheel ruts. Boot prints. A dropped shell. But past the rocks, the robbers had scattered. Their tracks split into six directions, then vanished on hard shale. Brennan stood and cursed. Every day he stayed blind, another wagon would bleed out. Hoofbeats came from the road. Two riders. A woman with two Colts on her hips reined up first. Behind her rode a bearded man, hard-eyed, guns worn low. Brennan didn't know them, but he knew trouble when it wore that much iron. "You're the marshal," the woman said. Not a question. "Cassidy Westbrook. This is Jake Lawson." "We're passing through," Jake said. "Saw you crawling in the dirt." "Robbers hit our wagons," Brennan said. "Trail ends here. I can't cut it." Cassidy swung down. She looked at the scattered tracks, then at the shale. "You're reading it wrong. They want you chasing six trails." She walked past the rocks and crouched. "Five sets double back. One doesn't." Brennan followed her finger. One set of prints ran deeper. Loaded. "That's the take," he said. "Man carrying stolen flour rides heavy," Jake said. "The rest are decoys." Brennan had missed it. He'd trusted the count of tracks over their weight. Cassidy stood and brushed off her knees. "The deep one leads that way." She pointed toward a low wash where the shale broke into soft sand. Brennan mounted fast. The loaded trail held. Print after print, deep and sure, cutting north across the sand toward a stand of dead cottonwoods. He rode it two miles before it climbed toward a shack hidden in a dry gully. Smoke rose from a stovepipe. Behind the shack sat a wagon, half-loaded with sacks that weren't theirs. Brennan reined up on the ridge. He had it now. The den. The men. The stolen food, sitting in plain sight. He counted the horses in the corral. Nine. He counted the rifles leaning against the shack wall. More than one man could carry. This was no lone thief. It was a gang, dug in, waiting for the next wagon. Behind him, hooves crested the ridge. Cassidy and Jake sat their mounts, looking down at the same nine horses. "You found your robbers," Cassidy said. "Too many of them," Brennan answered. One man couldn't take that shack. And come morning, another wagon would roll toward Hailscar, straight past that gully.