E. J. STAKELY

The Run

A Western

At six o'clock sharp on the fifteenth of April, a cannon opens the Sorrel Reserve and the whole territory runs for it. Ines Calloway, a surveyor's widow, comes over the rim forty minutes late, leading a lame mare, and finds the valley flagged from rim to rim.

At the bend of the creek, by the only spring, a boy is asleep against his stake. He shows her his father's watch. Four minutes past six. He got there first.

By morning the stake is gone, and the land office book gives the bend to Harlan Teague, a freight man from the junction, entered at five past six. Nobody lies. The clerk writes what he is told; the riders saw one stake and say so; the preacher thanks God for the ones who were ready.

Ines has her husband's chain, his field book, and one line she wrote by the fire that night. Over five years of wire and harvest, a contest and a dry summer, she and her neighbours learn exactly what the book will believe, and begin, without anyone deciding it, to leave the corners of their fields uncut.

The Run is a quiet Western about the land rush, about honest offices and the people they pass over, and about the old habit of leaving something at the edges for whoever comes late.

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