All for the Love a Dear Little Girl

 

From Historium

They came after midnight in 1879, New Mexico Territory—five cowhands drunk on whiskey and mean luck, looking for something to break. The Thorn sisters, Eliza and June, were alone by then. Their father had died in a mine collapse the winter before, and their land sat far enough from town that lawmen came only when the buzzards had already done their work. The men kicked down the door, laughing, certain that two girls in a half-rotted shack would fold easy. But the Thorn girls weren’t made of fear. They were made of grit, grief, and the kind of quiet that only comes from digging graves with your own hands.

June stood her ground, wide-eyed, pretending to plead. Eliza slipped through the back door into the cold night, bare feet whispering over the dirt. Her father’s rifle still hung by the barn, its stock smooth as memory. She loaded three shells with shaking fingers, then braced it against the window frame. The first shot split the dark like lightning. One man dropped. The rest turned wild, stumbling over one another as the sisters’ vengeance filled the air. The fight was short. The silence afterward, longer.

When dawn finally crawled over the horizon, two bodies lay cooling in the dust, and the other three were ghosts vanishing into the desert. Eliza found June sitting on the porch, blood on her knuckles, eyes steady. They didn’t speak. There was nothing left to say. That morning, the Thorn sisters buried what fear remained beside their father’s grave. And when they stood, the sun caught the rifle in Eliza’s hands like it was made of fire. Out here, on the edge of the world, they’d been tested—and they did not break.