Outlaw!Robin whose father dragged her to the ranch’s property line at seventeen and told her to never come back, ‘else he’d put a bullet between her eyes, all because he’d caught her behind the bales with the girl from the general store, Miss Dunne.
She’s homeless, panicking. She tries to get a job at the saloon in town, at the butcher shop, and even at a nearby, rivaling ranch but no one gives her a second glance, except for a couple of sleazy and unsubtle propositions. No one cares about the years she spent as the ranch’s only hand, her father unable to afford anyone else and instead deciding he’d shove her in his old clothes so no one would turn up their chin at the fact that a girl was the one caring for his entire livelihood.
At the end of the day, she’s just a girl. An unmarried girl with no family ties and no money to her name.
She doesn’t know what to do. So she does the only thing she knows.
Her father has a prize stallion, a white Arabian named Silver, the very horse whose foals pulled them out of bankruptcy all those years ago. The same horse that grew up right alongside her. And it kills her, but she knows her only option is to take Silver down to the auction yard, to the men who had been chomping at the bit for years to be able to claim him as their own, and sell him for far less than what he was worth, but more than enough to get her a train ride West to where her uncle would surely take her in.
She cleans herself up as well as she can, draped in her father’s clothes just as she was every other time she took livestock to the auction yard, and she sneaks back into the ranch. Silver knows her well, leans into her hand when she raises it to stroke his nose. Doesn’t even flinch when she puts his lead on, big brown eyes watching her diligently as she leads him calmly from the stable.
When the man comes up to her at the auction yard, crooked teeth gleaming as he grins at them, going on and on about how long he’s waited for this moment, she almost doesn’t want to let Silver go. But she knows it’s the only option she has.
Her heart drops when the auctioneer comes in, says “Y’know… Your daddy warned us you might be in. Gave us a high sum to make sure you didn’t make it back out.”
She can’t even blink before a shotgun is in her face, then a pistol pressed between her shoulder blades.
The auction yard goes quiet. Deadly quiet. From the corner of her eye, she sees a ranch hand pause right as he’s stowing a stash of cash he had just gotten from a herd of sheep into his satchel.
“Come on now… Nice and easy…”
Robin doesn’t know what to do. She’s penniless, Silver whinnying beside her as he feels her agitation, hooves stomping against the soft mud, and she has nowhere to go. She feels her last chance slipping through her fingers…
It’s the ranch hand, pushing his hair back from his eyes as he levels with the auctioneer. He could leave right now, his cash safe in his hands, but he doesn’t…
“She’s a thief.” The auctioneer spits and it lands on Robin’s boot, then looks to the man behind her, grinning, “Go on then. Take her out back.” When she flinches, the gun digs into her back even harsher. The man behind her grabs ahold of her arm, yanking her harshly, and when she doesn’t yield, digging her heels into the mud and shouting, she gets a pistol butt to the temple.
She’s knocked flat into the mud, stars filling her vision as she tries to scramble away, her arms and legs not working like they should. Vaguely, she hears shouting, then the man that hit her grabs ahold of her leg and yanks her. Still dizzy, she somehow manages to land a solid kick between his legs, buying her a couple of seconds to scramble up. She grabs the first thing she can find, a dirty manure shovel, and slams it into the side of his head before he can straighten up and level his pistol at her again. He falls headfirst into the mud.
The ranch hand scrambles over to her, another man rushing past him towards a nearby set of horses, and through her blurry vision she can see the auctioneer is slumped against one of the stable doors. The pistol in his hand is still smoking.
“Come on!” The ranch hand says, stowing his own pistol as he grasps her arm, “Laws comin’! Stick with us!”
She grabs ahold of Silver, barely managing to scramble onto him before a group of men barrel through the yard, bullets flying.
They escape the town by the skin of their teeth, slowing to a stop long after she had seen the last lawman slump off his horse. It’s then that she learns who these men are, Steve and Eddie. And that they are decidedly not ranch hands, instead being thieves themselves who stole that herd of sheep as the real ranch hands were on their way to sell them.
They extend an invitation to her, after she tells them a little bit of the story that led up to the auction yard, leaving out some choice details. They invite her back to their camp a couple of counties over, at least until she can get enough money to get that train ride.
Before long, she becomes an integral part of the gang. She’s quiet and, above all else, she’s slippery, always managing to escape every situation she’s thrown into, no matter how dire. The leader, Murray, is a neurotic man, but he keeps them alive and, after his initial rage at finding out Steve and Eddie had brought her to camp, he allows her a chance to prove herself useful. He leaves her alone, for the most part, so long as she stays out of his way, and he pays her an even cut just like she was one of the boys. And she’s not gonna lie, his under-the-table deals with Sheriff Hopper have certainly helped keep her from haunting the cot in the Hawkins jailhouse for more than a night at a time…
Steve takes her under his wing, teaches her how to handle a gun and how best to swindle the soft-footed denizens from Saint Denis whenever she happens to cross paths with their stagecoach. Everyone says he takes care of her because he’s sweet on her, which might’ve been true at one point, but he was also the first man that didn’t strike her the moment her secret was revealed, instead launching into a wheezy joke about her heart singing for ‘flouncy Miss Vickie from the general store’, so she couldn’t deny that he held a special place in her heart. And after ending up hog-tied at his side one too many times, she was sure there wasn’t much that could tear them apart.
When she overheard some fellas at the saloon talking about a stash that Mr. Creel, the most powerful man in the state, had hidden up on his property, maybe she had gotten a bit too big for her britches. A bit too comfortable in this lawless world that she’d been accepted into, where she could be loud about who she was and where she wanted to go. She didn’t expect it to go so wrong. She didn’t expect to find something she couldn’t just walk away from.
She didn’t expect that a few hours later, she’d be fleeing the property penniless, throwing Molotov’s into drought dry tobacco with a little skin-and-bones girl trembling on Silver’s back.
She didn’t think that night would be the beginning of a story that ended with her standing in the pouring rain, barefoot on the gallows, praying to god that the Bounty Hunter she loved was far enough away that she could never make it there in time to try and do something stupid, something life-ruining, to save her. Praying to god that she had been able to slip through Nancy’s fingers one last time.
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