The train exhaled a great, final sigh of steam and shuddered to a halt. For Beatrice Kincaid, the sound was a death knell for the civilized world.
She stood, brushing imaginary dust from her navy serge traveling suit, the heavy wool an act of defiance against the suffocating heat that already seeped through the carriage windows. Outside, there was no manicured platform, no bustling porters, only a raw, splintered plank walkway laid over a sea of rust-colored dust.
This, according to the conductor’s gruff pronouncement, was Redemption, Texas.
The name felt like a cruel joke. There was nothing redemptive about the scene that greeted her.
A single, wide street baked under a sun so white and merciless it bleached the very color from the sky. Buildings, hastily constructed from rough-hewn timber, leaned against one another for support, their false fronts like tired masks on weary faces.
A profound sense of disorder reigned—a stark, chaotic antithesis to the meticulously ordered gardens and lecture halls of her Boston life.
With her leather-bound satchel in one hand and her precious specimen case in the other, Beatrice descended the steep steps.
The moment her button-up boots, so sensible on cobblestone, touched the ground, a puff of fine ochre dust coated their polished leather. The heat was a physical blow, a dry, baking oven-blast that stole the moisture from her throat and made the whalebone stays of her corset feel like a cage of fire.
Her arrival did not go unnoticed. Life on the main thoroughfare, what little there was, seemed to pause.
A blacksmith, his face a mask of soot and sweat, stopped his hammer mid-swing. Two women in faded calico dresses, their faces prematurely aged by sun and hardship, paused their conversation to stare openly.
A trio of cowboys lounging in the sliver of shade offered by a canted awning fell silent, their eyes tracking her as if she were some exotic, and likely foolish, species of bird blown disastrously off course.
Beatrice lifted her chin, a gesture practiced in the male-dominated halls of the university. Condescension was a language she understood, though she had never encountered it in this raw, unfiltered form.
It was in the slow, deliberate way the men looked her up and down, their gazes lingering on the impracticality of her attire—the fitted jacket, the slight bustle, the hat pinned at a precise, fashionable angle. They saw a fool. Let them.
Fools were underestimated, and in that, there was a certain advantage.
Her mission was all that mattered.