The Girl of My Heart

On a moon-pale Christmas Eve, an orphaned girl, Joan, slips the iron leash of a tyrannical mistress and drifts like a snowflake onto the lamplit portico of the White estate, where tuberculosis has turned young Rodney into a living ghost. One whispered promise—tomorrow can still burn brighter than the star atop the tree—stops his pistol mid-air; together they flee eastward into the cobalt vastness of the frontier, chaperoned by Aunt Prudence’s parasol and the wheeze of Rodney’s one good lung. Beneath buttes that resemble shattered cathedrals they stumble upon Major Philips trading firewater for Lakota souls; the villain, scenting exposure, dispatches the half-breed renegade Chawa to silence the boy and bag the girl. A bullet meant for the heart merely kisses Rodney’s rib, and while Joan is dragged through sandstone labyrinths, a reclusive physician who dialogues more with ravens than with people nurses the poet-patient back to breath. The final rescue is staged at dusk, when the sky itself seems to bleed indigo: Rodney, no longer pallid, strides through sagebrush smoke, disarms Chawa with the same trembling hand that once cradled a suicide note, and finds in Joan’s eyes the first clean air his lungs have ever tasted. Love, like the frontier, turns out to be less a destination than a horizon that keeps receding yet somehow cures them both.