THE GREEN LINE – CHAPTER XI
By Kenneth Howard Smith
Produced for SDC Audiobooks, a division of SDC OmniMedia Group
The Colonel was a man built from rail and reason. Pride fit him like a well-tailored uniform, and after two years of dust, debt, and defiance, he had earned it. Nineteen stations stood gleaming in the sunlight—iron veins stretched across fifteen hundred miles of wild land, humming with steam and promise. The twentieth was nearly done, but one last stretch called to him—a thin red line across the map, running beyond what Washington had approved.
By law, the Green Line was to end sixty miles west of El Paso. But Colonel Thomas Courtney Green was not a man easily bound by paper. He’d seen what delay and hesitation cost in this world. So he extended the rails another fifteen miles, deep into a place forgotten by progress—a town named Rosamund, huddled in a small, wind-swept basin ringed by red rock and memory.
Rosamund was no more than four hundred fifty souls strong, a remnant of miners, drifters, and settlers who refused to give up on bad soil. The Colonel remembered it from years ago when it was just a scatter of shacks and a general store. He’d been a young captain then, fighting the Boll Weevil blight that chewed through the cotton of Texas and Louisiana like a biblical curse. Now, riding into town again on his roan stallion, he saw the same dust, the same crooked fences, the same desperate hope clinging to the air.
At his side rode Thomas Reed—soldier, confidant, and the closest thing the Colonel had to a brother. Reed had followed him from battlefields to boardrooms, and through the long nights when war left the world too quiet to bear. He was a man of even temper and wide shoulders, and though the Colonel was the strategist, Reed was the heart.
They paused at the top of the ridge before descending into the valley. Below them, the land fell away into a wide V-shaped canyon, streaked with sage and rust. The soil was red as iron and stubborn as any soldier. Yet somehow, down there, things grew. The townsfolk had carved a living out of that earth—soybeans, peanuts, onions, and rows of apple trees that somehow clung to life in the desert wind. A single thread of water wound through it all, silver in the late sun, feeding the town like a thin vein of mercy.
As they rode down the narrow trail into Rosamund, the Colonel felt the ghosts of old history stir. These were the places where the frontier’s heartbeat still echoed—where women carried rifles beside their brooms, and men buried dreams under the same soil that starved their crops.
The general store still stood at the town’s heart, its plank walls gray from years of wind. Inside, one could buy anything from a pound of flour to a shot of mean whiskey, and if you stayed long enough, you’d learn every story from five counties over. Outside, the air smelled of sweat, dust, and horses—civilization’s perfume in the West.
But not everyone in Rosamund was glad to see a new railroad coming. Some saw it as a promise; others, a warning. Among them was Winterford Scott.
Winterford was a woman of about thirty-five, though hardship had carved older lines into her face. She owned six hundred acres along the eastern ravine—a patch of stubborn land her father had claimed after the war. She lived alone now, her husband long buried, her sons scattered to the wind. The townsfolk said she had too much pride and too little sense. She said she preferred solitude to fools. Both were true.
On the day the Colonel rode into Rosamund, Winterford had been in the general store, three swigs past sober and full of words better left unspoken. When old Mr. Baines refused to sell her another bottle, she cursed him loud enough to shake the rafters. He tossed her out into the dust, told her to dry up or leave for good. She spat in the dirt and started walking home—five miles through heat and emptiness, carrying her temper like a torch.
The road home ran along the dry riverbed. Once, water had carved a graceful path there, feeding a small lake near her property line. But the drought of ’73 had cracked it dry, and what remained was a ghost of water—just enough to keep the mesquite alive. Still, Winterford knew every bend, every twisted cottonwood along the way. She’d walked it more times than she could count.
As she trudged the long trail, she noticed two riders behind her—the Colonel and Reed, their horses kicking up soft red dust. They slowed as they caught up, tipping their hats politely.
“Ma’am,” the Colonel said, his voice steady but kind. “Need a ride?”
“I’ve walked this road since before you laid your first rail, Colonel,” she said without looking up. “I reckon I can manage it.”
Reed grinned. “That so? Then you must know where a man might find a decent cup of coffee around here.”
She stopped then, finally glancing up at the two strangers. “Only one I know brews it strong enough to melt your spoon,” she said. “And he died last winter. You’ll have to settle for my kitchen.”
That was how Colonel Green first came to the Scott homestead—a meeting of pride and fatigue on a road carved by time. By the time the sun slipped behind the red hills, the three of them were sitting around Winterford’s stove, coffee steaming between them, her dog asleep by the fire.
Outside, the night wind carried the scent of dust and sage. Inside, something older stirred—a sense that these strangers, thrown together by happenstance, were part of a larger story yet untold.
The Colonel spoke of railroads and the promise of connection, of how steel could bind the farthest corners of the country. Winterford listened, half skeptical, half curious. She spoke of the land, of its moods and memory, of how it took a lifetime to earn its respect. Reed listened too, watching the way the firelight caught her eyes when she spoke of her late husband—the man who’d planted the first apple trees in that canyon.
By the time the clock struck midnight, the three were quiet. The railroad, the drought, the past—they all hung in the air like old dust.
And outside, on the edge of the ravine, the faint sound of a night train whistle echoed far to the east—where the Green Line ended, and where, soon enough, it would begin again.
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