A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A frontier banker has one day to recover an unsecured loan from an old friend.
An aspiring soldier of fortune follows his favorite adventure plots into a South American revolution.
A salesman dismisses novels about love across class lines, then tells a fellow passenger about his own courtship.
A hungry wanderer reaches the Texas border, where fierce looks and a loud voice can earn an outlaw's reputation.
A frontier town’s drunken gunman faces a determined marshal just as a visitor arrives who remembers a very different man.
A political hopeful congratulates himself on exposing a train-carriage swindler—until two small details unsettle his triumph.
A sheltered woman enters political society armed only with novels and local newspapers, and finds villains everywhere she looks.
A traveler confides how his tyrannical aunt vanished—and why her family paid kidnappers to keep her away.
A mouse inside a fastidious traveler’s clothes forces an impossible choice in a railway compartment shared with a sleeping woman.
A timid English traveler stranded in a snowbound railcar must rely on a calm peasant woman whose confidence comes at a price.
A cheerful rider stops at a lonely house and offers hope to a proud family whose silence conceals a different kind of loss.
A dull commuter wins attention with an invented tale, then discovers the cost of becoming known as a liar.
A bored bachelor challenges an aunt's moral tale with a story whose horribly good heroine earns the children's full attention.
13 stories
