The Best Coal Stoker's Western Passage

About this book:

The Rio Grande doesn't forgive, and neither does the firebox of a Mississippi River packet. Silas Vance traded his tin star for a coal scoop the night he put a bullet through a judge's nephew—an honest shooting in a territory where honesty gets you hanged. Now he's three hundred miles from the noose, shoveling Pennsylvania anthracite into a white-hot throat of iron aboard a steamboat churning toward war, where the only law is steam pressure and the only mercy is the next breath of foul, sulfurous air.

Below decks, the boat is a hell of grease, noise, and clanking oak pitmen; above, the river bluffs crawl with bloodhounds and a deputy named Harlan Vance who shares Silas's cursed blood and a rifle called "The Parson." Between the Mexican cavalry on the far bank and the judge's vaqueros on the near one, Silas has thirty yards of mud and a boiler that demands three scoops every two minutes—or the whole army walks. He's got two cracked ribs, a Paterson Colt wrapped in oilcloth, and a Dutch fireman named Gimp who measures survival in missing teeth and melted brass.

From the salt flats of Texas to the coal-smoke horizon of the western passes, *The Best Coal Stoker's Western Passage* burns with the grit of *Blood Meridian* and the mechanical poetry of *The Sand Pebbles*. This is frontier fiction stripped to the bone: no romantic outlaws, no manifest destiny—just a man feeding the fire that might carry him to freedom, or blow him to pieces before dawn.