This Tennessean, like many, is a storyteller. She comes from a place of pines, hollers, and ringing fiddle and banjo. She sings the ballads of her home to these westerners, who have never seen a squirrel chase his lady around a tree or smelled the nectar of a magnolia. They have other stories here--stories of cattle rustling, gold panning, sheriff's posses hunting men down in the wild scrubland. But the stories of Tennessee are simpler, more heartfelt.

It's not the stories by themselves that captivate the westerners, night after night, town after town. It's the way she tells them, like she lives them for a few moments at a time. It's the way she weaves them together with the strums of her guitar, speaking to every cowboy, barkeep, and serving wench like they're the only one in the room. She laughs to herself. If she's being honest, her pretty face doesn't hurt either. Hell of a lot of good it's done her.

The Tennessean picks up her guitar and slings it over her back, right above her bag of possessions and the pistol on her hip. The pistol is new, a precaution after everything that happened. She isn't sure she could kill a man with it, if she had to, but at least she looks the part of a western girl now. Her coat of brown fleece is western, and her canvas pants, and the riding boots on her feet. The black hat on her head, bartered from a cowboy in Durango, completes the look well. But the guitar, delicately set with tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl, is all Tennessee.

She tunes it up one string at a time. Takes a sip of water, since it'd be unprofessional to sing on whiskey. Boot heels clack on wood as she walks down the stairs to the smoky saloon. Gamblers and rustlers alike stop their beer-soaked conversations to listen when she strums her guitar.

She smiles. She loves this part.

For the next few hours, this saloon belongs to her. She begins with songs of the Smoky Mountains, mist and moonshine and tick hounds running coons down by the Cumberland. One story after another, she tells the westerners how she misses her home and the love she left there. Then it's songs about trains, tall prairie grass, bears and wolves and bison. They learn that however much she misses Tennessee, she loves the West more.

Then a hush. A tear? She sings about a cold night in prison. About digging a grave for a hated man she loved, however briefly. His bones rest beneath the brush, beside a creek, across from a wide-open field, with no stone to mark them. Only a song. Every story she tells feels like the whispering of a long-lost secret, but this one feels like more than that. With the last strum, a gambler breaks into tears. She slings the guitar, her dearest and only companion, back over her shoulder. They call her Gin, like the drink, and tonight she has intoxicated them well.

As she leaves, a man stops her. "Drink for the pretty lady?" He has a crisscrossing pattern on his shirt and a rifle on his back. A trapper.

He looks well enough--nice blue eyes, not too old, not the cruel type. But she refuses and heads back to her room. This Tennessean knows better than to fall in love. They call her Gin, and all she's ever done is burn men like hundred-proof liquor, leaving the sour taste of pine in their mouths. Her heart is guarded, but it is not cold. It's not a man's love she seeks on her journey anymore, but the love of the world. She's seen the way fish love a river, dew loves the grass, the sky loves the stars.

The greatest love story in the world is sung one moment at a time, in every forest, mountain, and village. Gin listens, and dreams of writing it in a way that men will understand. That is why she travels the West.