THE GREEN LINE – CHAPTER TEN
By Kenneth Howard Smith
By the time the Green Line reached its tenth year, its rhythm pulsed through the heart of the new West. Steam engines hissed and whistled in the early morning air, sending ribbons of smoke over a land that had once been empty, wild, and uncertain. The Green family had turned iron and ambition into a living network—towns sprouting like seeds along the rail, each one fed by courage, by commerce, and by hope.
Colonel Edward “Tom” Green had inherited more than just his father’s dream; he had inherited his mother’s mind for business and her restless, reforming heart. Elizabeth, his sister, had become the quiet architect behind their success—her hand steadying the ledgers and her insight opening the stores in every town that bore their family’s mark. The prophets—both the financial kind and the dreamers who worked the line—said the same thing: the Green Line had changed the very idea of the frontier.
But even among the map of thriving towns, one place stood apart—Rosamund.
Tucked away in a hidden valley, Rosamund was more a scar than a settlement when the Colonel first heard of it. A few weathered shacks, a post office that leaned with the wind, and a general store that doubled as the town’s heart, church, and gossip mill. The rest was red dirt and silence.
Colonel Parker—Tom’s old war companion and one of his surveyors—remembered Rosamund from his youth, a lonely place where soldiers once searched for a cure to the cotton plague, the dreaded boll weevil. He’d told Tom stories about the red hills that shimmered under the sun, thick with iron and minerals. “That ground,” Parker said, “bleeds rust and money.”
It was enough to send the Colonel west.
He rode out from the Green Line’s southern spur with a small crew—two surveyors, a clerk, and his old friend Parker. The air thinned as they climbed through the foothills, their horses kicking up the same red dust that had once driven settlers away. By dusk, the first flicker of oil lamps appeared—a cluster of glowworms in the valley below.
Rosamund wasn’t much. Four hundred and fifty souls, all carrying the same worn look of people who had fought too long against the land. Freedmen, escaped slaves, half-blood ranchers, displaced Natives, and runaways from both sides of the border—Rosamund was a haven for the forgotten. Its strength was in its stubbornness.
Among them was Wendy Winifred Scott, a girl of mixed blood and fierce spirit. Half Apache, part Mexican, part something else—the kind of beauty that didn’t belong to any one world. She was sixteen, barefoot most of the time, her eyes dark and defiant. The townsfolk said she’d been taken by the Comanche when she was barely twelve and freed by accident when the Army raided the camp. No family claimed her. She claimed no one either.
She lived near the general store, danced for coins when the whiskey took her, and slept wherever she fell. Some pitied her, some feared her. But none saw her the way Colonel Green would.
The first time he saw Wendy was outside the saloon, just before dusk. The wind was sharp, carrying the smell of creosote and dust. She was dancing barefoot on the hard-packed earth, her hair whipping around her face, the movement wild and beautiful. A circle of men stood watching, throwing coins at her feet, half in admiration, half in mockery. When the Colonel dismounted, silence rippled through the crowd. He picked up one of her coins—a silver dollar, dulled by time—and handed it back to her.
“This belongs to you,” he said.
She stared up at him, eyes hard. “It always did.”
That moment was the spark.
Over the weeks that followed, Green stayed in Rosamund, overseeing the first survey lines for what would become the westernmost branch of his railroad. But his attention wandered—more often than not—to Wendy. She had no education, but a sharp mind; no family, yet an instinct for survival. She reminded him of the land itself—rough, scarred, and full of hidden strength.
He hired her as a guide, claiming he needed someone who knew the hills. Truth was, he needed a reason to keep her close.
As the days passed, the work began. The men dug, blasted, and built through the red clay hills. Green’s engineers—many of them veterans from other towns—brought the same vision they’d used in South Abilene and Crystal Springs: a school, a library, a baseball field, and rows of simple homes for the workers. But Rosamund would be different. It wasn’t built for the rich or the railroad elite. This one was for the forgotten.
He promised wages fair enough to live on, and education for every child—regardless of color. He even brought in teachers from back East, women who were shocked to see Black and Native children sharing desks. But they stayed.
Wendy watched it all unfold with cautious wonder. She’d never seen order brought out of chaos before, nor kindness born of power. Colonel Green had every reason to look past her, yet he didn’t. He listened. He asked about her dances—the meanings behind the movements—and she told him of her mother’s tribe, of rituals meant to heal and to call rain.
It wasn’t long before the whispers began. The railroad men knew the signs: late-night talks by the fire, walks through the valley at sunset, and the way he’d stop everything when she appeared. They said the Colonel had gone soft, that he was “building a town for a girl who couldn’t read her own name.” But the Colonel didn’t care.
By the end of that summer, Rosamund had its first train stop—a simple wooden platform and a sign painted white with “ROSAMUND – GREEN LINE” stenciled across it. The day the first engine rolled in, the whole town turned out. And at the center of it stood Wendy, dressed in a hand-me-down gown, holding a single sunflower.
It would be months later when she found herself with child—a secret she kept as long as she could. The gossip spread faster than steam, but when the Colonel found out, he neither denied nor hid it. “If this child is mine,” he said before the townsfolk, “then it’s a Green. And every Green child, born of this land, has a place in it.”
From that moment, Rosamund changed. The town that had been forgotten by history found a heartbeat of its own. The people worked harder, prouder, believing in something bigger than the rails.
Years later, when the Green Line stretched from El Paso to the Rockies, Rosamund remained its quiet jewel—a reminder that love, scandal, and vision often walked hand in hand across the dusty plains.
Wendy’s child, a boy with his mother’s eyes and his father’s stubbornness, would grow up to be one of the great builders of the western territories. And whenever travelers asked why the station in Rosamund bore a green wreath carved above its doors, the townsfolk would smile and say,
“Because that’s where the Green Line found its heart.”
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