Sarah Todd by Chloe Garner

Author:Chloe Garner [Garner, Chloe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Horse Called Alpha
Published: 2018-01-07T22:00:00+00:00

“You just remember that, the next time you start thinking you might like to own a mine,” Jimmy said without turning to look back over his shoulder. Sarah smiled to herself.

Outside, they got the horses loaded quickly, taking Thomas’ horse as a pack animal for the sacks of ore, and started back down the mountainside before Wade or Rich picked up the pluck to argue again.

Dog ran along side, sniffing through the brush as they went, looking for rodents and varmints, coming back once with blood on his muzzle.

“Good dog,” she said. Jimmy didn’t address her, and she didn’t try to get him to talk to her. She didn’t want conversation any more than he did.

They made it back to the Lawson house by midafternoon, and Sarah left him, going into town to check the damage.

It was as bad as she might have imagined, with pieces of it being much worse.

The shops were buried up to mid-thigh with sand on the backsides, and while they’d dug a path into Granger’s, you couldn’t see the boardwalk for the dune of sand that had accumulated against it and the building. Sarah looked up at the sky, feeling the breeze of cool and damp as it breathed through town.

Rain.

It would be here tomorrow or the next day, most likely. Three days at the most.

They needed to get the laborers up out of town and into the mountains before the rain hit, so that they didn’t get bogged down in the muck. It would rain up in the mountains every day, the way it always did, but the clouds would be heavier, closer, and the rain would be thicker and wetter than the wet side was used to.

Then those clouds would hit the heat over Lawrence and the rest of the desert, and they’d just open up, like a hose pointed at a wall. All of that water would come rolling down the dry side of the mountains and across the desert plains, pushing a wall of sediment and dust in front of it, cleaning and watering the desert, but leaving true devastation wherever anything bigger than a man’s wrist was growing or standing. The cows needed to be up in the high country before the rains came, because they were dumb enough to wash away. Most families brought their important livestock and their horses into the houses, which were built to withstand most of the impact of such a flood.

This one would crush at least one homestead down to nothing. Sarah couldn’t predict which one, though she could pick the two or three most likely. The barns would need to be reclaimed. The fields, the ones that weren’t harvested by now - gremlin had six planting seasons a year - would be lost. The homesteaders knew that. They would cope. She might need to step in to help, in the worst case or two, but they would cope.

The flood of young men would not. She had little doubt they’d be digging corpses out

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