All But One

"I hauled every dead man out of Frisco for six years. All but one." Milford, Utah, 1928. Hendrik "Dutch" Brouwer is seventy eight years old and dying in his bed. For more than forty years he has kept his silence. Now he has sent for a young newspaperman, and he has one condition: not a word gets printed until he's in the ground. In 1880, Hendrik rode the railroad to the end of the line with his wife, two small children and almost nothing else, chasing a dream of land of his own. He found Frisco instead -a roaring silver camp where a man lay dead in the street most mornings and nobody would touch him. So Hendrik did. He took the job no one else wanted, driving the dead wagon, digging the graves, and writing every man in a ledger-and giving a name to the ones who had none. Then the town sent to Pioche for a marshal named Pearson. No jail. No trials. Be on the road by dark, or die. The first night, Dutch loaded six men. And when he bent to lift the first of them, the marshal took the feet. What grows between the gravedigger and the gunman is a friendship neither man expected -Sunday suppers, a checkerboard on the porch step, and a town that loves its marshal right up until it begins to fear him. Everyone in the valley has a story about what became of Pearson. Only one man knows the truth. A haunting Western of friendship, conscience, and the weight a man carries for a lifetime, set in one of Utah's most storied ghost towns.