Saddle Tramp Women ★ Quick

"More of the same," Nora replied, accepting a tin cup of the boiling, bitter brew. "More sky. More dirt. More freedom."

They sat in silence, listening to the horses munching contentedly outside. They had only a few dollars between them, a couple of Winchester rifles, and the clothes on their backs. But as the desert stars began to blaze to life through the open doorway, filling the darkness with a brilliant, icy light, neither woman would have traded places with a queen. They were the queens of the endless trail, the women who rode with the wind. If you'd like to explore this world further, let me know: Saddle Tramp Women

Nora unsaddled the horses, checking their backs for sores and rubbing them down with a handful of dry grama grass. Martha got a small, smokeless fire going in the hearth, throwing a handful of Arbuckle's coffee beans into a blackened tin pot. "More of the same," Nora replied, accepting a

By nightfall, they had reached the shack. It was little more than a stack of rotting cedar logs and a stone chimney, but to them, it was a palace. More freedom

"There's an abandoned line shack another two miles up by the dry creek," Nora said, squinting against the glare. "We'll make camp there. Plenty of grama grass for the horses."

The sun was dropping low over the Chihuahuan Desert, turning the vast expanse of Texas scrub and rock into a canvas of bruised purple and burning gold. Nora adjusted her grip on the leather reins, feeling the steady, rhythmic shift of her buckskin horse, Dusty. Behind her, Martha rode a stout bay that had seen more miles than most men in the territory.

They weren't outlaws, and they weren't typical cowhands. They were drifters by choice, bound to no man and no master but the changing of the seasons. Nora had left a suffocating life in an Ohio parlor ten years ago. Martha had simply walked away from a burnt-out homestead in Kansas after the fever took her family. The trail had brought them together, two solitary souls finding a shared language in the creak of saddle leather and the vast, silent stretches of the American West.