Clementine "Clem" Buckle had never shot a gun in her life. This was not due to any philosophical objection. She simply could not hit anything. She had tried. Once, as a child, she had aimed at a tin can from three paces and somehow managed to shoot her own boot. The bullet lodged in the leather, just above her little toe, and her mother had taken the gun away and never given it back.
Twenty-three years later, Clem arrived in the town of Dust Gulch with two dollars, a mule with a limp, and an ambition so outsized it practically glowed around her like a heat shimmer. She intended to become somebody. She intended to be remembered. She had not yet figured out how.
Dust Gulch was the most dangerous town in the territory. This was not an exaggeration. The previous three sheriffs had quit within a week, and the one before them had been carried out feet-first after trying to arrest a man named Rattlesnake Roy for spitting on the boardwalk. The town's main street was lined with saloons, each one louder and more lawless than the last, and the local undertaker had recently expanded his business to include a second floor for overflow.
Clem saw the town and felt not fear but opportunity. "This place needs a sheriff," she said to her mule, who flicked an ear in what might have been agreement or might have been a muscle spasm.
"It's had three this month," said a man sitting on a barrel outside the livery stable. He was whittling a piece of wood into the shape of a smaller piece of wood. "They all quit."
"Then they lacked ambition," Clem said. "Where do I sign up?"
The man stared at her. She was five feet two inches tall, weighed perhaps a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, and wore a hat that had been chewed on by her mule. Her gun belt — which she had bought at a pawn shop for thirty-five cents — held a single revolver that she had never fired and had no intention of firing if she could possibly avoid it.
"The mayor's office is the building with the hole in the roof," the man said. "From the last sheriff. He shot himself in the foot trying to demonstrate his draw."
"Perfect," said Clem, and she strode inside.
Mayor Thaddeus P. Grumble was a man shaped like an egg who had been trying to resign for seven years. "You want to be sheriff?" he asked, peering at Clem over a stack of eviction notices. "Have you had any law enforcement experience?"
"I once returned a library book three weeks early," Clem said. "I believe in accountability."
"Can you shoot?"
"I can point a gun in a direction. What happens after that is between the bullet and the Lord."
The mayor considered this. "You're hired. The salary is eighteen dollars a month, which I should warn you the previous sheriff never collected because he fled town before payday. Your first order of business is Rattlesnake Roy, who has been terrorizing Dust Gulch for the better part of a decade."
Clem strode out of the mayor's office with her chin held high. She found Rattlesnake Roy at the Broken Spoke Saloon, where he was in the process of drinking an entire bottle of whiskey without using his hands — he simply tilted his head back and poured it down his throat from a distance of approximately six inches. The saloon patrons were placing bets on whether he would choke.
"Rattlesnake Roy!" Clem called out, her voice cracking only slightly. "I'm Sheriff Clementine Buckle, and I'm here to inform you that spitting on the boardwalk is a violation of town ordinance 47-B."
The saloon went silent. Roy turned slowly. He was six feet five inches tall, had a beard that looked like it had been woven from barbed wire, and wore two revolvers so polished they gleamed like mirrors.
"You gonna make me stop, little lady?" he asked.
"I certainly hope it doesn't come to that," Clem said. "But I have a gun, and I'm not afraid to use it in a general direction."
Roy laughed. It was a deep, rumbling laugh that shook the glasses on the bar. He drew his revolver and fired a single shot, which removed the hat from Clem's head and pinned it to the wall behind her. The mule outside let out a bray that sounded suspiciously like a sigh.
Clem did not flinch. This was not because she was brave. It was because she was too terrified to move. But Roy mistook her paralysis for composure, and his laugh faltered.
"You shot my favourite hat," Clem said, her voice surprisingly steady. "That hat has sentimental value. It was chewed on by my mule."
Roy blinked. "Your mule?"
"His name is Gus. He doesn't like you."
At that moment, Gus the mule — who had wandered into the saloon in pursuit of a sugar cube he had glimpsed on the floor — let out a defiant bray directly behind Rattlesnake Roy. Roy spun around, startled, and in his surprise, dropped his revolver. It landed on his foot. He howled in pain, hopping on one leg, and crashed into a table covered in glasses.
Clem took this opportunity to handcuff him to the bar.
Over the following weeks, Clem's reputation grew. She arrested the Dalton Gang by accidentally locking herself inside their hideout and refusing to leave. She foiled a bank robbery by falling through the skylight. She solved a horse theft by asking the horses where they had been, then pretending they had told her.
Every success was a glorious accident. Every arrest was a misunderstanding that worked in her favour. The people of Dust Gulch began to believe that Clem Buckle was the greatest sheriff the Wild West had ever seen. Clem knew the truth — that she was a walking disaster with a talent for being in the right place at the wrong time — but she also knew that perception was nine-tenths of the law.
Her ambition, once a vague shimmer on the horizon, had taken solid form. She was somebody now. She was remembered. And when she finally did fire her revolver — by accident, of course, while trying to swat a fly — the bullet ricocheted off a church bell, struck a hanging chandelier, and landed precisely in the middle of the town's annual pie-eating contest, disqualifying the reigning champion and earning her the gratitude of every baker in town.
On her six-month anniversary as sheriff, the mayor presented her with a new hat. It was made of fine leather, with a silver band inscribed with the words "Sheriff Buckle — Dust Gulch." Gus the mule chewed on it affectionately, and Clem wore it with the brim dented and the silver scratched, because she had learned that perfection was overrated.
What mattered was ambition. And luck. And a mule who knew when to bray.