Introducing Madelyn O'Hare

Chapter 1

The dry dusty air seemed to choke Maddy. Her mother's hand, usually a comfort, held her close. There was no comfort in that hand now. Maddy watched her father, her tall, handsome father, with snapping black eyes and curling black hair. He stood as still as if he were a tree, rooted to the spot, not a twitch to be seen from his fingers, as they held steady over the holster of his gun. Her mother's hand shook on Maddy's chest. Maddy saw a man move out onto the porch of the saloon across the street. He moved slowly, carefully and Maddy wondered if he was trying to see her father better, to see her father facing the bad man who stood across from him. Maddy didn't know why, but sometimes her father stood across from men and shot them with his gun. She thought it had something to do with the shiny star on his vest. There was a flurry of movement, Maddy saw a flash from the balcony, heard her Mother screaming and saw her father was falling, falling…

Maggie O'Shaughnessy sat up gasping in her bedroll. She shakily lifted one of her Wells Fargo Colts and scanned her surroundings. Nothing. Nothing to have wakened her, except the remnants of her own cries. She lay back down, gun in hand, taking deep, calming breathes until she sunk into sleep again.

Father was laying in the street, unmoving a pool of blood soaking the parched ground around him. Maddy wrenched herself from her mother's shaking grip and ran blindly toward him. Stumbling, she fell heavily beside her father. "Da" she screamed, "Da, wake up!" She buried her face into his chest that was sticky with blood. Maybe if she stayed here forever, with him, it would be Ok.

When Maggie opened her eyes the sun was peeking over the mountains to the North. Sighing she sat up and started to stretch out the inevitable kinks that came with sleeping rough. Stirring up the coals, she proceeded to make a simple breakfast of a biscuit and tea boiled in a billy. Within half an hour, she was packed up and swinging herself up on her horse, KD. Checking her Colts were properly holstered she pointed KD in an easterly direction. Destination: Rock Creek.

"I've got an errand for you boys, I need you to ride over to Blue River and deliver a message to the Marshall there". Teaspoon Hunter squinted up at Noah Dixon and Jimmy Hickok. "Should only take you 3 days 'round.

"You want us both to go?" Noah looked questioning at Teaspoon.

"There's been some reports of people getting waylaid along the Blue River trail, figure safety in numbers is sensible." Teaspoon handed an envelope over.

Jimmy shrugged his assent, looking out across the town.

Noah pushed his hat back on his head, "Always liked that stretch of land, nice scenery." He turned to Jimmy, "Leave in an hour? I'll get some grub from Rachel." After thwacking Jimmy across the chest with his hand, he took off with long-legged strides towards the Pony Express station.

"Jimmy, you boys ride careful, hear?" Teaspoon said.

"Always", replied Jimmy, ambling off to saddle the horses.

Maggie usually kept a sharp eye on the trail ahead of her. After all, a young single woman was considered easy pray for the types of men who made a dishonest living thieving off travelers. Many a woman travelled with a fairly substantial purse. Of course, many a woman also travelled with a companion as well. A women on her own, especially a young women, offered a different sort of prize for some men. Maggie made it a habit to dress in men's clothes and kept her curly black hair in a ponytail, shoved under a hat. From a distance she could pass as a young man. Maggie never gave much thought to her appearance; she had more important things to consider. However, if she had ever bothered looking into a mirror she would have seen a set of snapping black eyes, curly black hair that fell halfway down her back when loose, both compliments of her Irish Father. Her sharply angled cheekbones, full-lipped mouth and pointed chin were inherited from her French Canadian Mother. Maggie would never be called pretty by most.

However, today Maggie kept getting distracted by her dreams of the previous night. They were reoccurring dreams, but ones that she had thought she had been growing out of as late. It had been several months since she had last had them and she'd hoped to be finally leaving them behind.

It was that distraction that kept her from noticing the two men awaiting her approach from a stand of trees in the trail ahead. It didn't help that the sun shone directly at her from close behind them. At any rate, she didn't see them until she almost astride them.

"Well, what have we here?"

Maggie pulled her reins in sharply and started to wheel KD away from the man who spoke. However, at the same instant he stepped toward her and cocked his gun, leveling it somewhere around her midsection. She stared a moment at the gun, feeling the crushing weight of panic in her chest.

"It ain't any young mister we's got here, it's a young miss," the man threw over his shoulder to his companion. "Don't worry miss, we ain't going to hurt you, not least in anyways you's won't enjoy some."

Maggie looked into the eyes, creased with dirt and saw nothing to reason with. In what seemed like an eternal instant, Maggie made up her mind as to the situation. When the man reached out to grab her leg, she kicked him full in the face and at the same moment she reached and drew her gun. She heard bones crunch and the man staggered back. She wheeled her horse away and fired in the general direction of the second man she had barely glimpsed, hoping to force him to cover and give her enough time for escape. She heard gunfire from the direction of the copse of trees and felt a hot searing pain in her upper leg. In the same instant, KD went down. She could only assume he'd been struck somewhere as well. She hit the ground hard, jarring her shoulder and wrist as they took most her weight in the fall.

Glimpsing a rock outcropping just ahead, she ran low towards it, limping heavily and yelling "KD, stay down". Another couple of shots pinged ahead of her as she skidded to a stop and collapsed down behind a boulder, her leg giving out. "Shit, shit, shit" she muttered under her breath, opening her gun to reload rounds out of her coat pocket. She slammed the barrel shut, pulled her second gun and positioned to shoot back towards the trees. She had to keep them from shooting KD again; although KD was doing what Maggie hoped was his training, that being only pretending to be a dead horse. She tried to evaluate the situation while firing back in intervals. She had limited ammunition in her coat pocket, maybe ten more rounds, she was losing feeling in her leg and she hadn't any water. She couldn't carry out a long exchange under these conditions. Closing her eyes momentarily, she rested her forehead on the sun-bleached boulder. She'd lived fifteen years, all but the first few of them hard and unforgiving. She'd hoped to at least live long enough to see justice served. There had been other tricky situations and she'd made it through. However, she couldn't see a way out of this one.

Dammit.

More gunfire split the air, this time from a different direction and Maggie's eyes snapped open. She wasn't about to go down without a fight. Hopefully, she'd be taking some of them with her.