The Red Ripper by Kerry Newcomb

Author:Kerry Newcomb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

18

“ … A HARD CHOICE.”

Summer passed.

Weeks of endless blue skies with only a suggestion of clouds, faint brush strokes from the hand of God, diaphanous wisps, barely glimpsed by shaded eyes. From time to time men chanced a glance toward heaven and prayed where they toiled beneath the merciless sun. A few showers fell, just enough to save the crops, though there wouldn’t be abundant yields, barely enough to hope for better days next year. The long days wore on, ever the topic of conversation being the heat.

“It’s never been this hot.”

“If it doesn’t rain soon, we’ll lose the crops.”

“Ain’t never seen the Brazos so low.”

“I don’t know about you, but I feel like a loaf of bread left too long in the oven, burned hard and hardly fit for sopping.”

In Texas, in the summer of 1835, dry bread and thirsty men would have to do.

About the time colonists from San Felipe to Nacogdoches to Washington-on-the-Brazos and all of East Texas began to doubt it would ever rain again, September ushered in a change. The wind shifted; a storm whirled in from the gulf and flooded Anahuac, washed away the streets, blew in through the unshuttered windows of the abandoned barracks, and howled through the open empty warehouse. A high tide even threatened the house on the strand, but John Bradburn was no longer there to care. Folk rightly assumed the alcalde had abandoned his dreams and his whores and departed for San Antonio, where General Cos kept a worried command.

The storm swept inward, clouds roiling like a witch’s brew, gray thunderheads piling one upon the other, billowing over the horizon, and drenching the parched pines of the Big Thicket. The rain was a blessing. But what followed it into San Felipe was anything but a godsend. A friend returned, cloaked in a mantle of war, and many who saw him would not live to see another spring.

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