Hairtrigger

Halden, Nebraska, November 1879. In a cell that faces the courthouse yard, a condemned man lies awake and listens to carpenters build the gallows that will hang him at dawn. Hammer, then saw, then hammer again — and every strike pulls him back into a life he has spent years learning to tell one particular way.

Amos Deakins was a good shot long before the war ever taught him to kill on command. At Champion Hill an officer gave the order, he fired, a man died, and everyone agreed that was right. He came home in 1865 to a farm that had learned to run without him, drifted west into the railroad camps, and somewhere out there found the thing the war had left him fit for. The first time he killed a man with no one near enough to give the order, he told himself it was reflex. Years later, with dawn coming on, he is no longer sure that was true.

By morning he will have told the story of his life twice: once the way he has always told it, and once the way it happened.

Hairtrigger is a spare, unsparing novella about the distance between the man who fires on an order and the man who learns to give himself one — and how short that distance turns out to be.