Thorne's Girls
Copyright© 2025 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 1
The sun was a hammer in the sky—late afternoon now—beating the life out of the scrub and flattening every ridge and gulch into a monochrome of dust and despair. It clung to the air, this fine silt, and coated the bay horse beneath me just as it coated my soul.
My name is Silas Thorne. I used to be a man who lived for something more than mending broken wire, but that time had been buried beneath a cottonwood near my property line—a wife, Martha, and our daughter, both lost within a day of each other from typhoid. That was the line drawn in the sand.
Every day since then had been a hollow formality. I ate, I rode, I worked, but the cabin I returned to was nothing but a shell, and I was the ghost who haunted it. My life was defined by grim duty, devoid of hope, and that’s precisely how I wanted it to stay. Hope was too brittle a thing to keep in this country.
That afternoon I wasn’t seeking adventure. I was just returning from selling three horses I’d broken and trained. My rifle was resting in the scabbard, the heavy Colt .45 on my hip untouched for months. I’d grown weary of the arguments of men and the quick, brutal violence of the frontier. I had no appetite for death, having already invited it too deeply into my home.
It was on the lip of a low ridge that I saw the movement. At first I mistook it for a starved coyote stumbling awkwardly against the vast emptiness. But as my horse topped the rise, the shape resolved itself—a child. Small, terribly small.
She looked to be Blackfeet. Her legs were scored with scratches, raw and bleeding from the sagebrush. Her skin was a beautiful, rich, soft copper caked in sun-baked dust. She wore a single ragged piece of buckskin that offered no decency. Three years old, maybe four, and utterly alone.
I hauled back on the reins. My heart—a lump of coal I’d long thought inert—slammed against my ribs. This was a bad sign. A truly terrible sign.
A lone child out here meant raids or worse. It appeared to be the gruesome work of raiders who had swept a camp, leaving her as the sole tragic remnant. I scanned the horizon, the tension coiling tight in my gut, searching for smoke, for riders, for any hint of movement. A posse, raiders, a search party. Nothing. Just the dry, hot wind carrying the sound of my horse’s labored breathing.
The girl stumbled, regaining her balance with a desperate, animalistic lurch. She kept moving, but without purpose, like a kite cut loose from its string.
I dismounted slowly. My boots crunched the hard dirt, the sound loud in the silence. I knew the protocol of fear. I raised my hands, palms open and empty, showing her I held no threat.
“Easy now,” I spoke, my voice a low, steady rumble stripped of any sharpness. The word itself was meaningless to her, but the tone, I prayed, was universal.
She froze. Her tiny feet were planted wide as if she were waiting for the ground to open up and swallow her. Her eyes—wide, dark, liquid, and utterly terrified—darted between me and the open land. She was trembling, her lips cracked, clutching a dirty strip of cloth in one fist like it was the only anchor she had left in the world.
A sickening wave of memory washed over me. I’d seen this look before. The profound shock of being violently severed from everything familiar. It was the face of the recently orphaned, the recently broken. I hated the memory, despised that it had chosen this tiny, innocent creature to manifest in again.
I knelt, trying to bring my bulk down to her level.
“You’re alone,” I muttered, the curse escaping me on an exhale. Damn it all.
My mind screamed at me right away: Ride on, Silas. She is not your burden. You are not built for this. Take her to town and you invite danger, prejudice, and a fresh wave of loss when you are forced to give her up. I had buried my capacity for commitment years ago. To take her was to invite the world back in.
But then I saw the truth. She wouldn’t survive the night. Not against the coyotes, the cold, or the stray outlaws.
The decision, when it came, wasn’t intellectual. It was a physical tightening in my chest, a desperate echo of the man I used to be.
I opened my arms slowly. She hesitated, her small body rigid with mistrust and terror. Then, as if a dam had broken, she stumbled forward and collapsed against me. She felt shockingly light, all sharp bone beneath dusty skin. I wrapped my arms around her, felt her tiny fists clutch the front of my shirt. I exhaled a shaky, profound breath.
The path ahead was marked, and there was no turning back.
I carried her to the horse. She flinched when the bay snorted, but I whispered low to both of them, calming the child and the beast. I settled her in the saddle, climbing up behind her. Her small, trembling back pressed against my chest. She was utterly silent, clinging to that wretched rag she still held tight.
I rode toward my hollow shell of a home, each mile heavier than the last. Who was she? Was anyone looking?
Her desperate clinging told me everything—she was nobody’s now.
I thought of Martha’s grave, barely visible beneath the cottonwood. I thought of the silence in the cabin, and I felt a shift, a grinding tectonic movement inside my core. This hurt, yes—it hurt because it reminded me so profoundly of what I had lost—but it was a living pain, not the sterile numbness of my grief.
By the time the cabin came into view, the sun was sinking, bathing the log walls in a dying orange light. I dismounted and carried her inside, kicking the door shut. The air smelled of cold smoke and old leather.
I set her gently on a folded quilt near the stone hearth. She sat without protest, arms wrapped around her knees. I offered her water in a tin cup. She snatched it with both hands, drinking so fast she choked, water spilling down her chin. I steadied her, making her slow down.
I boiled beans—simple, soft, nourishing. When they were ready, I fed her small spoonfuls, holding the pot steady. She ate like a starving animal, stopping only when her small belly appeared visibly eased. She watched me constantly, wary but no longer terrified.
Afterward I went to a dusty shelf and pulled down a small rag doll. Martha had sewn it years ago, a hopeful creation for our daughter Becky. I had kept it only because I was too numb to throw away the pieces of my past.
Handing it over now felt profoundly strange, like giving away a fragment of my unfinished self. The girl reached out and clutched it, pressing it to her chest. Her small shoulders relaxed. Her breathing deepened. Minutes later, curled up against the quilt, she was asleep, the crackle of the fire covering her soft, even breaths.
I sat in my chair, leaning forward, hands clasped, watching her. The weight of this choice was immense, heavier than any fence post I’d ever hauled.
I had sought solitude, safety from feeling, safety from need. But life, cruel and unexpected, had forced this vulnerable creature into my path. I knew I wouldn’t take her to town. I wouldn’t surrender her to the inevitable scorn and questions. No.
I was keeping her.
I glanced toward the window, toward the fading light on the mound beneath the cottonwood. What would Martha have said? My chest tightened, but for the first time in years, the cabin did not feel utterly empty. It felt occupied.
The morning broke gray and cold, the chill seeping into the logs. I woke before the sun, the habit of duty impossible to break. The fire had died to a faint bed of coals. She was still there, a tiny, immobile anchor, the rag doll clutched tight.
The child was filthy beyond measure, her skin caked with days—maybe weeks—of trail dust and dried blood from the scratches covering her legs. The scrap of buckskin she wore wasn’t even decent, torn and inadequate to cover what needed to be covered.
I heated water over the fire, pouring it into the old tin tub Martha had used for laundry. The task ahead filled me with a profound apprehension, but there was no choice. The child desperately needed bathing, and there was no woman to do it.
I kept my movements efficient, clinical, embarrassed almost because her eyes never met mine. I’d bathed my own daughter once, just like this, when Martha had been ill with fever. The memory made my hands shake slightly. I washed the grime away gently, careful of her wounds, keeping my eyes averted as much as practical decency allowed. She flinched at first, then seemed to understand I meant no harm. She giggled when I washed her feet and in between her tiny toes.
Her hair was matted with burrs and dirt. I worked carefully, using soap Martha had made years ago, untangling the knots with patient fingers. The water turned brown, then black. I refilled it twice.
When she was finally clean, I wrapped her in a rough towel and carried her to the bedroom I hadn’t entered in three years. From the chest at the foot of the bed, I pulled out one of my daughter’s cotton dresses—small, faded blue, with tiny buttons I’d watched Martha sew. My throat tightened as I helped the child into it.
It fit her almost perfectly. Too perfectly.
She looked up at me with those dark, solemn eyes, and I had to turn away before the grief overwhelmed me entirely.
The days that followed fell into a rhythm I hadn’t known I was capable of anymore. Emma—I’d started thinking of her that way immediately, as if the name had always belonged to her—shadowed me everywhere I went. She was silent still, communicating only through those enormous dark eyes and the occasional tentative gesture, but she was always there. A small, persistent ghost trailing three feet behind me.
The first morning, I woke before dawn as always and found her already awake, sitting exactly where I’d left her by the fire, the rag doll clutched to her chest. She watched me with that unnerving stillness as I stoked the coals and put coffee on to boil.
“You hungry?” I asked, knowing she wouldn’t understand but needing to fill the silence with something other than my own breathing.
She blinked. That was all.
I made cornmeal mush, sweetened it with a precious spoonful of molasses, and handed her the bowl. She ate slowly this time, with more control than the desperate gulping of the night before. When she finished, she set the bowl down carefully and looked at me, waiting.
“Well,” I said, standing and reaching for my hat. “I’ve got work to do. You can ... I don’t know. Stay here, I suppose.”
I made it to the door before I heard the soft pad of bare feet behind me. I turned. She stood there in the blue dress, watching me with something that might have been fear.
“You want to come with me?”
No response. But when I pushed the door open and stepped into the cool morning air, she followed.
The chores were simple—feeding the horses, checking the fence line near the spring, splitting wood for the stove. Emma trailed behind me like a shadow, never more than a few feet away, never quite touching. She watched everything I did with intense focus, as if memorizing the patterns of this strange new world.
When I went to the barn to feed the horses, she hesitated at the threshold. The darkness inside, the smell of hay and leather and animal musk—it must have been overwhelming. But she stepped inside anyway, her small hand reaching out to touch the rough wood of the door frame as if anchoring herself.
My bay gelding, Copper, nickered softly from his stall. Emma froze.
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