Everybody called it Boot Hill, but there was no hill about it—not even a rise on the flat, dusty ground just off the rutted road half a mile out of Trinidad, New Mexico.

The spot had been chosen because of a resilient mesquite tree that provided some color and shade, but this scrubby patch of earth otherwise had nothing to recommend it. For serving a town of less than three hundred, this was a well-populated cemetery, wooden crosses clustered with the occasional flat tombstones popping up like road markers. On this April morning, a breeze flapped hat brims and bandanas into flags and stirred dust into foot-hugging ghosts. Like diffident mourners, distant buttes lurked, turned a light rust color by a sun still on the rise, faces of their steep cliffs sorrowful with the dark shadows of erosion.

Willa Cullen, her father's only daughter—only offspring—by rights should have worn a Sunday dress, its hem weighted down with sewn-in buckshot to fight the wind. But she was in a red-plaid shirt and denim trousers and boots with stirrup-friendly heels, the kind of work clothes worn by the handful of her papa's ranch hands that could be spared to attend the small, sad graveside service for Bud Meadow.

Reverend Caldwell from Trinidad's church, Missionary Baptist, presided over this congregation of half-adozen cowhands, their boss, his daughter, and a dead boy in a pine box in its fresh hole. No townsfolk were present.

No surprise, really. Nobody knew Bud very well. He'd drifted in looking for work, Papa had given it to him, and come first pay, end of the month, Bud had gotten himself shot outside the Victory Saloon.

Trinidad had a reputation for looking the other way when cowhands came in on those particular Friday nights. It became routine for any business—save the Victory, the two restaurants, and the barbershop—to board up their windows till the boys got it out of their systems. In front, the affected businesses just stacked the lumber up under the windows along the boardwalks.

But Bud had mouthed off to the sheriff, and the sheriff had shot him down in the street. Funny how only the Cullen cowhands seemed to wind up that way—half a dozen were already buried here on Boot Hill. Now among them was a Meadow, planted but never to blossom.

Who were his parents? Willa wondered. Did he have brothers or sisters? Friends forged on trail drives?

They would never know. No date of birth, no full name. Just a white wooden cross, freshly painted but soon to be windblown and blistered.

Willa was a pretty thing but not delicate, near tall as her father but with her late Swede mother's hourglass figure and also the same straw-yellow hair worn up and braided back. She had been called a tomboy in her youth, but was too much of a woman for that now, though she often wore ranching-style riding apparel like today.

She meant no disrespect to the late Bud Meadow. She just knew she needed to be dressed to ride, though her father—in his black Sunday suit and string tie and felt hat—had brought the big buggy, drawn by a pair of horses, with plenty of room for her to sit beside.

Really, this was about Papa's stubbornness. In buggy or wagon, he refused to let his daughter take the reins, leaving her to ride alongside on Daisy, her calico, and surreptitiously guide the hitched-up horses, should Papa need the help he refused. Leaving the hard-packed, rutted road to take the turn into Boot Hill was an example of that.

But for a blind man, George Cullen got around well.

Her papa's blindness had come on gradual over these five years past, until now his unseeing stare had a disturbing milkiness. He would wince and narrow his eyes and widen them, as if that would somehow summon vision that was only a memory now. Still, their world was small enough—ranch, road, town—that Papa could manage. Mostly.

When the service was over, and the grave diggers gone to shoveling, Papa sent Whit Murphy, his foreman, back with the boys, and—with Willa's subtle help—steered the buggy back onto the road and headed into town. Whit had offered to come along and several others chimed in their willingness, too.

It had been Willa who discouraged them.

"If just Pa and me ride in," she said firmly, "there'll be no trouble. You boys chaperone us, we could be back out here at another service tomorrow. Maybe more than one."

Whit, lanky and weathered with a Texas-style Stetson and droopy, dark mustache, only nodded, touched his brim, and rode off, the rest following.

It didn't have to be said: a blind man and a girl could ride in and, no matter what transpired, ride back out again. Even Sheriff Harry Gauge had to respect some things.

The buggy and its calico escort took it easy down Main Street's row of facing frame buildings. At this end of Main, the white wooden church seemed to stare all the way down at its bookend, the bare-wood livery stable whose high-peaked hayloft mirrored Missionary Baptist's steeple. The street itself wore a layer of sand, carted in from the nearby Purgatory River, to hold down the dust. Wooden awnings shaded the boardwalks, a few women in gingham out shopping, encouraged by the cool breeze, always welcome in this hot dry climate.

All very civilized, Willa thought.

Hardware store, apothecary shop, barber, hotel with restaurant, mercantile store, bank, telegraph office, saloon. From Main's stem several streets shot off and modest houses hid back behind the tall false-fronted clapboard stores and the occasional brick building. Trinidad existed to serve the ranchers, large and small, who lived and worked in the surrounding area. The population here was merchants and their employees. Nicely dressed, genteel folk who depended on the rough men and frontier women who made making a living in this hard country possible for those softer than themselves.

Down toward the livery stable, with its blacksmith forge out front, was a scarred adobe building that had once been a Mexican army outpost and still sat apart from the rest of the town, across from a scattering of adobes, the homes and businesses of the town's modest Mexican contingent.

Seated under an awning that had been added onto the tile roof, watching the world go by, were two big rough-looking men in their thirties, one leaning back in his wooden chair with his boot heels catching the railing.

Willa and her father were only halfway down Main when her father asked her, "You see him?"

Papa meant Sheriff Harry Gauge.

"I see him, Papa."

"Where is he, child?"

"Where he always is, when he's not in that saloon."

"In front of his office."

"In front of his office."

"Anyone with him?"

"Just that nasty deputy. Rhomer."

"Let's go on down, then."

She frowned at the unseeing face as they kept up their leisurely pace. "Papa, you said the telegraph office. We're almost there. Let's do your errand and go about our business."

"Willa, make sure I stop right beside him."

"Papa, please ... let it be."

"You heard me, girl."

When they got to the sheriff's office, Willa cleared her throat just a little and her father brought the buggy to a stop.

Sheriff Harry Gauge took his feet off the rail and let the chair and his boots hit the plank porch, purposely loud. Gunshot loud.

Her papa flinched. "You there, Gauge?"

Gauge was a...