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The Reckoning Mile

Book 2 in The Straight Line Westerns

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by P M Charles

A dying man rides into Callan’s Station with one last piece of business. Frank Dillard was once Cole Whitaker’s foreman, the man who gave the orders during Cole’s worst years with the Hargrove outfit. Now Dillard is half-dead, carrying records that could expose old crimes, ruined land claims, and the men who profited from both. Before winter finishes him, he wants to reach the Cross homestead in the Beartooth foothills and say what he did to the family of a homesteader his outfit destroyed. Cole has built a life he never expected to want. Ruth Callan’s way station is warm, ordered, and his. But his code will not let him turn away from a dying man with a debt still unpaid. The road west is one hundred and twenty miles of killing Montana winter. Cattle are dying against fence lines. Rivers are iced treacherous. Horses are failing. Warren Hargrove’s riders are closing in, determined to keep Dillard’s records from ever reaching the Cross family or the territorial court in Billings. Then Nora Cross finds them on the trail. She has spent eight years hunting Dillard, not for revenge, but for something harder. She wants him to look her in the eye and tell the truth about her father. As the cold tightens and the past comes apart piece by piece, Cole is forced toward his own reckoning. Dillard was not only the architect of the man Cole used to be. He may also be the reason Cole became something else. The Reckoning Mile is a classic frontier Western about duty, consequence, and the hard distance between confession and forgiveness.

Publication date: July 14, 2026