Trixie Calhoun The Legend of the Texas Ranger

They said a woman couldn't ride the Brushy Creek trail in October. Trixie Calhoun rode it in September, just to make the point. She was twenty-six years old, three years on the badge, and she'd heard can't enough times to have stopped noticing it — the way you stop noticing a particular sound after you've lived next to it long enough. It was just weather. It was just the world being the world. What she hadn't stopped noticing was the wanted poster. It had gone up in Brackettville on a Monday. By Wednesday it was all the way to Del Rio. By the following Saturday — the day Trixie rode into Comanche Wells with her horse Birch in a lather and the October sun cutting sideways through the dust — it was nailed to the post office, the saloon, the general store, and, pointedly, the door of the Ranger outpost. ELIAS DRUM. $500. WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE. Elias Drum, who'd robbed three banks and burned one. Elias Drum, who'd left four men dead in Uvalde County and a widow with six children outside Hondo. Elias Drum, who'd reportedly ridden north with a gang of eleven men and was making his way toward the Red River and the uncertain country beyond. Trixie tied up Birch and walked into the outpost. Captain Aldrich looked up from his desk. He was a large man with a large mustache and the expression of someone who has been presented with one problem too many this week and had hoped the next person through the door would represent a solution rather than a complication. "Calhoun." "Captain." "You see the poster?" "Saw it in Brackettville on Wednesday. Drum's gone north." "He has." Aldrich leaned back. "Which is why he's Captain Cole's problem now, up in Wichita Falls." Trixie sat down across from him. She'd ridden ninety miles in two days and she felt every one of them, but she kept her back straight. "Cole lost him once already. Before Uvalde." Aldrich was quiet for a moment. "He did," he admitted. "I know the country between here and the Red River. I know where the crossings are that don't show on the maps. I know a man in Seymour who Drum used to ride with before he went bad." She met his eyes. "I can find him, Captain." Another silence. Outside, a horse blew and stamped. "It's rough country this time of year," Aldrich said. "And Drum's crew is eleven men." "Twelve," she corrected. "He picked up another one outside Brackettville. A sharpshooter named Cal Denton. I have his description." Aldrich looked at her for a long moment — the look of a man doing calculations. "Ride," he said. Trixie Calhoun was already standing. She was back on Birch inside of four minutes, riding north with her rifle across the saddle and a week's provisions and the knowledge — bone-certain, the way she knew all important things — that Drum was going to make a mistake. Criminals always made a mistake. It was usually in the moment they decided they were smarter than the person following them. She had never once let that moment go to waste. The Texas sky stretched out ahead, enormous and indifferent, the kind of sky that made every human problem feel both very small and very urgent. Somewhere under it, Elias Drum was riding. Somewhere under it, twelve men thought they were free. Trixie Calhoun set her jaw and rode. They'd find out differently.