The White Rider

A pallid newcomer in high-collar serge, Chauncey Day, drifts into Rawhide—a sun-bleached crucible where whiskey, quartz, and lies are the only currencies. Beneath the blistered timbers of the land office, Jackson Grade, dapper as a rattlesnake in Sunday silk, rewrites topography itself, forging claims the way fallen angels forge signatures. Brand’s lode, a seam of auriferous prophecy, becomes the bait for a $95,000 sleight-of-hand; when the miner spits on the paltry $5,000 offer, Grade stages his own assassination, a lurid theater of blood and perjury meant to hang Brand from the nearest cottonwood. Into this venal rodeo thunders the White Rider—moonlit albino stallion, cloak like a comet’s tail, voice of canyon echo—bearing ledgers that sing of perfidy. By the time the smoke clears, the timid tenderfoot has doffed his disguise, the villain’s empire lies in tinder, and Jewel Brand’s eyes hold the glint of both gold and dawn.