THE LOVES OF THE TRAIL - By Kenneth Howard Smith

 

**THE LOVES OF THE TRAIL:

A DOCUDRAMA OF CHARLOTTE, CHARLES & YELLOW FEATHER**
America, 1861–1880s: A Journey Across the Bones of a Nation, By Kenneth Howard Smith for SDC PaperDreams Books.

PROLOGUE – THE RIVER

The year was 1861, the air in South Carolina swollen with the thick, humid tension of a nation splitting along its own seams. Word had spread that President Abraham Lincoln had taken office, and along with him came the frenzied whisper that the Civil War had begun its terrible march. In the shadows of this unrest, where hopes were hidden like lanterns behind locked shutters, the Knight Riders—violent enforcers of the Slave Patrols—roamed like specters set loose.

In the midst of that fear-stained world lived Charlotte Hallmark, just twelve years old, slender as a reed but with a heart forged from something sturdier than steel. Her father, Professor James A. Hallmark, ran a small print shop—a shop whose back room served as a quiet artery in the network of the Underground Railroad.

Charlotte had wandered down to the riverbank that afternoon, trying to escape the smell of smoke and gunpowder drifting from the edge of town. The water ran brown and sluggish, swollen by spring rains. That was when she saw it—a tiny bundle bobbing gently in the reeds like a discarded rag doll.

She did not hesitate. Childhood vanished in an instant.

Charlotte kicked off her shoes, splashed in, and wrestled the small body to shore. The child—a baby, a month old at most—was pale, silent. And then, as she lay him on the muddy bank, he sputtered, choked, and began to cry.

And Charlotte, trembling, gathered him up in her arms.

She knew what had happened—everyone in the South knew. Slave patrols sometimes stole infants born of a white father and enslaved mother, dumping them in swamps or rivers to erase the “evidence.” Charlotte wrapped him in her own sweater and looked desperately for someone—anyone—who might have been searching for him.

But the river answered with silence.

She took the baby and ran.

CHAPTER I – THE PRINT SHOP FALLS

The Hallmark print shop, normally bright with the smell of ink and hot lead type, was now a battlefield.

The Knight Riders had arrived ahead of her.

Charlotte froze as she approached, baby pressed to her chest. Men were smashing type cases, burning paper reams, hurling presses to the ground. Her father—usually calm as a church elder—was red-faced, shout­ing, trying to fight them off with nothing more than a metal composing stick.

He saw her. He saw the baby. And he understood everything.

They had no choice. They fled that night, taking only what remained unbroken: a small press, a satchel of type, and the child Charlotte named Charles Alexander Hallmark.

The North took them in cautiously. Even the orphanages refused the baby—too complicated, too mixed, too political. But Charlotte would not let him go.

And so Charles became hers.

CHAPTER II – TEN YEARS OF SNOW

The Hallmarks made their new life somewhere between winter and necessity. For ten years, Professor Hallmark taught his craft in storefronts and barns. Charlotte grew into a young woman admired by Northern officers, courted by men with crisp uniforms and polished boots.

Charles—bright, curious, quiet at times—followed the Professor everywhere. He learned the smell of ink before he learned the rules of baseball. By thirteen, he could set type faster than some grown apprentices.

But Charlotte’s heart tugged her back and forth—love for Charles, love for her suitors, loyalty to the father who had lost so much.

It was Charles, now nearly fourteen, who freed her.

“You go,” he said. “Get married. I’ll take care of him now.”

She kissed him and held him tight, but he stood firm. He had learned endurance early, in the cradle rescued from the river.

Before she left, she whispered, “Don’t ever let anyone say you don’t belong.”

He never forgot those words.

Not once.

CHAPTER III – THE CALL OF THE WEST

1874.

America had stretched itself like a cat, sprawling westward across plains and mountains. Trains belched steam into the young sky. Telegraph wires hummed and sparked. Ranchers, miners, merchants—all moved with the restless beat of Manifest Destiny.

Professor Hallmark, weary of cold winters and longing for clean horizons, decided the West was calling him.

He and Charles packed their small printing world into a Saratoga wagon, hitched with a draft wagon full of presses, plates, ink, and lead type.

Their destination: the Kansas Territory, and from there along the Chisholm Trail into the still-forming Oklahoma Territory.

The Professor wasn’t just a traveler—he was an inventor. He created thin lead sheet stock for printing forms by melting down old bullets. Charles would hunt for old target trees along the trail, carving out slugs of spent lead like a prospector searching for nuggets.

They became indispensable.

Wedding announcements…
Business cards…
Hymnals…
Sale tags…
Contracts…
Even handmade envelopes.

Every settlement, every military outpost, every dusty trail town needed something printed.

Charles invented the “All Occasions Card”—a small, elegant greeting card suitable for anything from condolences to congratulations. It became a trail-side sensation.

The money was steady, the work constant. And the trail gave them a strange kind of freedom.

CHAPTER IV – FORT SUPPLY & THE GIRL WITH THE NAME OF THE WIND

By the time they reached Fort Supply, Oklahoma, Charles was seventeen, tall and strong, carrying a satchel of samples and a head full of stories he’d written during long nights by the campfire.

Fort Supply was a rough, buzzing intersection of tribes, settlers, and Buffalo Soldiers. It smelled of horse sweat, hot coffee, and tanned leather.

And in a small notions shop, he saw her.

Yellow Feather.

Their eyes met in the doorway, and something—something unspoken—settled in place like a puzzle piece that had been waiting for years.

She was educated, confident, fluent in English, fresh from an Eastern school where she had learned clerking, bookkeeping, and the new marvel called the Remington typewriter.

Charles followed her around like a lovestruck puppy.

He made her a small diary—mushroom-leather, her name embossed on the cover.

She laughed at his nervousness.
He adored her bravery.

She told him stories—about drilling wells, about making kerosene and even moonshine with old wildcatters. She had learned the land the way a doctor knows a heartbeat.

She also knew of a hidden valley—a place untouched in the coming Oklahoma Land Rush.

And she had a plan.

CHAPTER V – THE LAND RUSH

When the Professor fell in love with a widowed woman in the region, Charles realized he had a choice: stay, or follow a dream to California.

But Yellow Feather placed her hand on his and said, “Go for the land. I will help you.”

Native Americans could not claim land in the rush. But they could go anywhere without suspicion.

And she did.

Under cover of night, she secured a claim stake—the stake—that marked the valley she had loved since childhood.

The rush was thunder—horses pounding, wagons careening, dust flying. For days afterward, claimants lined up at the government office, stakes in hand.

Charles waited, heart pounding.
His number matched.

Just like that, Charles Alexander Hallmark became a landowner.

And Yellow Feather became his bride-to-be.

But there was more.

She saw additional stakes out in the hills—unclaimed, overlooked. Together they found them, racing against the clock, and Charles reached the government office at 3:45 p.m. Friday, the final day.

He became the last official registrant of the Oklahoma Land Rush.

His footprint etched into American history.

CHAPTER VI – THE WEDDING ON TRIBAL LAND

They were married quietly, beautifully, lovingly—on her tribal reservation. Buffalo Soldiers, settlers, tribal elders—they all knew them by then.

The Professor cried into his new wife’s shoulder.

Charlotte—far away in Nebraska Territory with her officer husband—received the news months later and wept with joy.

Charles had built a life from a river of pain and turned it into a future bright enough to share.

EPILOGUE – THE LOVES THAT BUILT TOMORROW

Charles and Yellow Feather built their life like a quilt—piece by piece, stitched with invention, heart, and the stubborn determination of people who believed in tomorrow.

Together, they created:

• A greeting card business from Charles’ All Occasions Cards

• A distillation operation producing kerosene and spirits

• Experiments with early gasoline for a thing rumored in the East… the automobile

• A printshop that carried their name across the West

They saved.
They dreamed.
They built.

In time, they would make that Overland journey to California. And their name—Hallmark—would come to symbolize stories, memories, and love written down so no one would ever forget.

Because a girl once saved a baby from a river.
Because a boy once saved bullets from old trees.
Because a young woman once saved a valley for the man she loved.
Because endurance, love, invention, and travel are the rivers that shape a people.

This is their story.
A story full of promise for all the tomorrows still unwritten.

Vinyl Knights - PLEASE BE MIND - By Kenneth Howard Smith

 

PLEASE BE MIND

Listen Along as you Read.

http://www.sdcomnimedia.net/paperdreams-radio/

A Desert Boy, a Drumbeat, and the Birth of a Music Life

The desert has a way of holding sound. Out there in the Antelope Valley, the wind carried everything — the howl of a coyote, the rumble of a passing train, and, if you stood still long enough, the faint echo of dreams waiting to be discovered.

During the years my older brother Billy served in the Marine Corps, I was just stepping into junior high school. I still had my drumsticks — always tapping, always searching — but I was hungry for something bigger, something I couldn’t quite name yet. Then came the Antelope Valley Fair, the biggest spectacle for miles, a beacon in the wide-open sand that promised lights, noise, and a little taste of the world beyond Rosamond.

That year I stumbled into my very first Battle of the Bands. And that day changed me.

Merrell and the Exiles: The Desert’s First Rock Stars

Most of the groups were kids trying to find a rhythm. But one band didn’t need to try. Merrell and the Exiles walked onto that stage like they already knew they belonged on record sleeves and radio waves. Sharp jackets. New guitars. Amplifiers that growled like desert thunder. When the lead singer thanked the crowd for buying their single “Please Be Mind,” the place erupted.

Then they hit the first chord.

I knew the song instantly — I’d heard it on the radio without knowing it belonged to boys from our own towns. The girls in the audience rushed the stage like a wave, and the sheriff’s deputies had to push them back. Not that the band cared. They never missed a beat.

Their sound was a fresh blend — a little country, a little R&B, a little rock ’n’ roll, and something desert-born and brand new. There were sparks of Chuck Berry, the fire of Little Richard, the ache of Patsy Cline, the polish of Ricky Nelson. And this was before the Beatles conquered America. These boys were ahead of the curve.

By the end of summer, “Please Be Mind” was climbing charts throughout the Southwest, spinning on KRLA out of Pasadena and KOMA in Tulsa — both 50,000-watt giants that reached states away. For a kid from Rosamond, the idea that our desert could touch the whole country felt impossible… and yet there it was, humming through the night on AM radio.

That seed stayed with me.

Finding My Beat

Back then Rosamond didn’t have its own high school, so I traveled to Antelope Valley High in Lancaster. Freshman year hit me like a cold gust. I didn’t really fit in — not with the white kids, not even with the handful of Black kids. I was caught somewhere in between.

The one bright spot was Katie Johnson.

Katie played clarinet. Two years older, graceful, talented, and sharp as a tack. I’d known her since elementary school, back when she and her friend Rose loved teasing me — and when she once beat me in a scuffle so cleanly it took the embarrassment right out of me. Years later, we both landed in the AV High marching band, older, wiser, laughing about the past.

Katie had blossomed into a young woman whose smile could soften the worst day. We stayed after school talking about music, life, and her dreams. One day she told me she’d be getting married after graduation and moving to Los Angeles.

My heart sank before I understood why. I’d fallen for her quietly, in the small spaces between our conversations.

She became the first girl ever to kiss me. It was soft, unexpected, and it stayed with me for decades like a melody that refuses to fade.

Her death — sudden, senseless, and so soon after moving to Los Angeles — hit me like a blow I wasn’t ready for. The kind you feel in your ribs years later. It took me twenty years before I could write a song for her. The refrain still plays in my head:

“Oh, Katie… there’s a beat in my heart for you.”

And there always will be.

Learning the Craft

Music kept me going. It held me steady when the rest of life felt off-tempo.

Through the school’s music department, I met John Parr, an older drummer who became the closest thing to a mentor I’d ever known. John taught me rudiments, stick control, coordination — the ABCs of every great drummer. He gave me technique, but more than that, he gave me confidence. His sudden death by suicide shook everyone who knew him, but the lessons he gave me stayed in my hands, in my wrists, in my heart.

Sophomore year brought a wild discovery: one of my classmates was the sister of Merrell Fankhauser — yes, that Merrell. She told me her brother had recorded an early surf-rock album called “Wipe Out” with his band The Impacts — before the Surfaris’ famous version ever hit the charts.

I didn’t believe her. Not until I found a dusty LP in the bargain bin at Woolworth’s. There it was: The Impacts. Del-Fi Records. Surf guitars blazing. And Merrell’s name on the label.

That little vinyl treasure was like a spark in dry sagebrush. It lit a fire in me that refused to go out.

Glenn Records: My Real Classroom

Soon after, I hitchhiked to Palmdale to meet Glenn MacArthur, founder of Glenn Records, whose garage doubled as a full-blown recording studio. Glenn welcomed me in and walked me through everything:

• a homemade mixing board,

• a 3M two-track reel-to-reel,

• and an isolation booth made from the cockpit of an F-105 jet.

You read that right — an actual jet cockpit.

Glenn had worked with giants:
James Burton, Elvis’s legendary guitarist.
Dolly Parton, before the world crowned her queen.
George Weston, a Bakersfield pioneer.

He spoke of the Bakersfield Sound — Buck Owens, Merle Haggard — a bold style that blended honky-tonk grit with the electricity of rock. To Glenn, music wasn’t just notes and microphones. It was a living thing, part of a lineage stretching from dusty bars to bright Hollywood stages.

That afternoon in his studio — touching the gear, smelling the reels, hearing the stories — that was my true education. School didn’t teach me half as much.

From Desert Sand to Radio Waves

Soon I found myself assisting in one of Merrell’s sessions — a track called “Send Me Your Love.” Everything was cut live. No overdubs, no second chances. The kind of recording where the room breathes with the musicians.

Glenn taught us a trick I still use today:
tune the kick drum to a low B-flat so it punches through the mix just right.

Merrell and the Exiles were taking off — signing deals with Golden Crown Records, landing spots on American Bandstand, getting airplay beyond anything our little desert towns had ever dreamed of. When their single “Tomorrow’s Girl” premiered on Dick Clark’s show, you could hear people talking about it from Rosamond to Mojave.

By 1965, Rosamond finally had its own high school, and I returned for my junior year. No car, no license — but I had purpose. My pocket held drumsticks. My mind held Glenn’s lessons. My heart held memories of Katie and John.

And with that mix of loss, love, and ambition stirring inside me, I knew exactly what I needed to do.

I started my own band.

Right there, in the desert that raised me.
Right there, with borrowed instruments and big dreams.
Right there, where music had already shown me its power.

That moment became the doorway to everything that followed —
a life of rhythm, recording, and the belief that even a kid from a dusty town can climb onto the airwaves and send a sound into the world.

CONSUELO JONES: PART FOUR A Spy Noir by Kenneth Howard Smith

 CONSUELO JONES: PART FOUR

A Spy Noir by Kenneth Howard Smith
(Set against the shadow games of the 1980s — a time when peace wore a smile and carried a gun.)

---

PROLOGUE

The World Changes Its Uniform

By 1981, the flags had changed but the lies hadn’t. The Cold War had become a television show—heroes and villains framed in prime-time, every covert operation dressed as patriotism. Presidents spoke of freedom while men in unmarked helicopters wrote their own constitutions.
And somewhere in the cracks, Consuelo Jones—believed dead, filed away, forgotten—was very much alive.

In a world now run by deals made in hotel lobbies and whispered over expensive Scotch, she had found anonymity in the one place still untouched by ambition: a fishing village south of Ensenada. She fixed radios, mended nets, and sometimes stared too long at the sea. The locals called her La Americana Silenciosa—the silent American.

---

CHAPTER ONE

The Stranger with a Photograph

It was a Tuesday. Always is, when fate knocks.
A man with government shoes stepped into her shop—creased khakis, mirrored glasses, the kind of haircut that doesn’t change with politics. He didn’t order anything, just placed an envelope on the counter. Inside: a single photograph of a young pilot—blonde, familiar—and a note that said, He’s alive.

The pilot was John. The man she had buried under stones in the jungle six years earlier.

She looked up at the stranger. “You’re late,” she said quietly.

He smiled like someone used to betrayal. “You’re needed again, Colonel Jones. The Company has ghosts that only you can talk to.”

---

CHAPTER TWO

Langley’s Mirage

Back in Washington, the CIA looked different but smelled the same—fresh paint on old secrets. The brass called it Operation Sandglass, a quiet, deniable program threading through Latin America’s new dictatorships. Officially, it didn’t exist. Unofficially, it financed rebellions, toppled governments, and fed both sides of every border war.

Connie’s handler was a young intelligence officer named Philip “Phil” Cates—too smooth, too polite, the kind of man who could ruin you with a handshake. He briefed her in a smoke-filled room beneath the Pentagon.

“Your pilot, Captain Reynolds—John—was extracted from the jungle. Never reported in. Now he’s flying cargo for a company that doesn’t exist. South Florida, Nicaragua, Honduras… You know the pattern.”

“I know the smell,” she said. “Cocaine and cash.”

He didn’t argue. “You’ll find him. Bring him home—or bury him properly this time.”

---

CHAPTER THREE

Miami Vice

Miami was a fever dream of pastel suits, Cuban coffee, and easy money. The city pulsed with cocaine dollars, and everyone with a boat and no conscience was suddenly a patriot. Connie blended in under a new alias—Constance Hale, import/export consultant.

She traced John through bars that never closed and warehouses that smelled like gasoline and danger. His face appeared in whispers: a pilot who flew anything, anywhere, no questions asked. Some said he worked for the Contras; others, for himself.

At a dockside bar in Little Havana, a drunk whispered something that froze her drink midair:
“He flies for Orion. If you see the owl, you’re already dead.”

---

CHAPTER FOUR

The Owl and the Cross

Orion Corporation—a front company run through Swiss banks and Florida real estate. Their jets moved “agricultural aid” south and “private donations” north. The aid was ammunition; the donations were cocaine.

Connie watched the paper trail bend like a snake: CIA contracts routed through shell firms, politicians smiling on TV while the same money burned villages. The mission wasn’t to save John anymore. It was to find out who had built this machine—and how deep the rot went.

She remembered her old War College paper, Project Santa Ana Hidalgo. The same logic. Different enemy. Only this time, the villain wore her country’s flag.

---

CHAPTER FIVE

Old Friends, New Wars

Manuela Ortega reappeared like smoke—older now, sharper, working inside the State Department’s “Latin Desk.” Over whiskey and silence, she told the truth:
“The White House wants deniability. They’re arming the Contras through third parties. If it leaks, they’ll bury everyone who touched it.”

Connie laughed, low and bitter. “So the same government that trained me to stop corruption now sells it wholesale?”

Manuela looked tired. “We stopped fighting wars abroad. So we started fighting them quietly, here.”

---

CHAPTER SIX

The Reunion

She found John in a hangar outside Managua. Same smile, same swagger, but something hollow behind his eyes. He hugged her like a man who’d forgotten how.

“They told me you were dead,” he said.

“I was,” she replied. “Just didn’t stay that way.”

They talked long into the humid night—about survival, about betrayal, about the feeling of watching ideals rot from the inside. John wasn’t a villain. He was what war does to a man who believes too long and sleeps too little.

When dawn came, he made a confession that turned her blood cold.
“Connie… these shipments? They’re not just guns. They’re people.”

---

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Fall of Orion

The next week was smoke and chaos. A Contra convoy ambushed, a radio transmission intercepted, and the CIA’s own pilots suddenly listed as casualties. Connie leaked documents through an old journalist contact in Panama—one story that would later echo as the Iran-Contra Affair.

Before the Agency could silence her, she vanished again—like she had in the jungle. John’s plane exploded over the Gulf of Fonseca. Official reports said “engine failure.” She knew better.

---

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Woman Who Knew Too Much

By ’89, the Berlin Wall was falling, and everyone pretended history was ending. But in the quiet corners of Langley, they still whispered her name like a ghost story.

A Senate committee reviewed boxes of redacted files, and a single phrase kept recurring in the margins:
Consultant: C. L. Jones. Status—Unverified.

---

EPILOGUE

The Desert Never Forgets

Back in Rosamond, California, a woman with a limp and a wide-brim hat walked the desert trails at sunset. She carried no weapon, no identification, just a radio that caught strange frequencies—numbers, voices, fragments of a world still burning quietly.

She lived near the old Edwards flight path. Some nights she’d look up and see test planes slicing the dark, the way secrets cut through history.

Once, a child asked her what she used to do.
“I kept bad men honest,” she said.
The child frowned. “Did it work?”

She smiled. “For a while.”

The wind moved through the creosote bushes, carrying the scent of dust and jet fuel. Somewhere far off, a distant hum—an aircraft nobody admitted existed.

Consuelo Jones closed her eyes, the desert warm around her, and listened.

CONSUELO JONES - PART THREE A Spy Noir by Kenneth Howard Smith

 CONSUELO JONES: PART THREE

A Spy Noir by Kenneth Howard Smith
(Set against the shadow games of the 1980s — a time when peace wore a smile and carried a gun.)

---

PROLOGUE

The World Changes Its Uniform

By 1981, the flags had changed but the lies hadn’t. The Cold War had become a television show—heroes and villains framed in prime-time, every covert operation dressed as patriotism. Presidents spoke of freedom while men in unmarked helicopters wrote their own constitutions.
And somewhere in the cracks, Consuelo Jones—believed dead, filed away, forgotten—was very much alive.

In a world now run by deals made in hotel lobbies and whispered over expensive Scotch, she had found anonymity in the one place still untouched by ambition: a fishing village south of Ensenada. She fixed radios, mended nets, and sometimes stared too long at the sea. The locals called her La Americana Silenciosa—the silent American.

---

CHAPTER ONE

The Stranger with a Photograph

It was a Tuesday. Always is, when fate knocks.
A man with government shoes stepped into her shop—creased khakis, mirrored glasses, the kind of haircut that doesn’t change with politics. He didn’t order anything, just placed an envelope on the counter. Inside: a single photograph of a young pilot—blonde, familiar—and a note that said, He’s alive.

The pilot was John. The man she had buried under stones in the jungle six years earlier.

She looked up at the stranger. “You’re late,” she said quietly.

He smiled like someone used to betrayal. “You’re needed again, Colonel Jones. The Company has ghosts that only you can talk to.”

---

CHAPTER TWO

Langley’s Mirage

Back in Washington, the CIA looked different but smelled the same—fresh paint on old secrets. The brass called it Operation Sandglass, a quiet, deniable program threading through Latin America’s new dictatorships. Officially, it didn’t exist. Unofficially, it financed rebellions, toppled governments, and fed both sides of every border war.

Connie’s handler was a young intelligence officer named Philip “Phil” Cates—too smooth, too polite, the kind of man who could ruin you with a handshake. He briefed her in a smoke-filled room beneath the Pentagon.

“Your pilot, Captain Reynolds—John—was extracted from the jungle. Never reported in. Now he’s flying cargo for a company that doesn’t exist. South Florida, Nicaragua, Honduras… You know the pattern.”

“I know the smell,” she said. “Cocaine and cash.”

He didn’t argue. “You’ll find him. Bring him home—or bury him properly this time.”

---

CHAPTER THREE

Miami Vice

Miami was a fever dream of pastel suits, Cuban coffee, and easy money. The city pulsed with cocaine dollars, and everyone with a boat and no conscience was suddenly a patriot. Connie blended in under a new alias—Constance Hale, import/export consultant.

She traced John through bars that never closed and warehouses that smelled like gasoline and danger. His face appeared in whispers: a pilot who flew anything, anywhere, no questions asked. Some said he worked for the Contras; others, for himself.

At a dockside bar in Little Havana, a drunk whispered something that froze her drink midair:
“He flies for Orion. If you see the owl, you’re already dead.”

---

CHAPTER FOUR

The Owl and the Cross

Orion Corporation—a front company run through Swiss banks and Florida real estate. Their jets moved “agricultural aid” south and “private donations” north. The aid was ammunition; the donations were cocaine.

Connie watched the paper trail bend like a snake: CIA contracts routed through shell firms, politicians smiling on TV while the same money burned villages. The mission wasn’t to save John anymore. It was to find out who had built this machine—and how deep the rot went.

She remembered her old War College paper, Project Santa Ana Hidalgo. The same logic. Different enemy. Only this time, the villain wore her country’s flag.

---

CHAPTER FIVE

Old Friends, New Wars

Manuela Ortega reappeared like smoke—older now, sharper, working inside the State Department’s “Latin Desk.” Over whiskey and silence, she told the truth:
“The White House wants deniability. They’re arming the Contras through third parties. If it leaks, they’ll bury everyone who touched it.”

Connie laughed, low and bitter. “So the same government that trained me to stop corruption now sells it wholesale?”

Manuela looked tired. “We stopped fighting wars abroad. So we started fighting them quietly, here.”

---

CHAPTER SIX

The Reunion

She found John in a hangar outside Managua. Same smile, same swagger, but something hollow behind his eyes. He hugged her like a man who’d forgotten how.

“They told me you were dead,” he said.

“I was,” she replied. “Just didn’t stay that way.”

They talked long into the humid night—about survival, about betrayal, about the feeling of watching ideals rot from the inside. John wasn’t a villain. He was what war does to a man who believes too long and sleeps too little.

When dawn came, he made a confession that turned her blood cold.
“Connie… these shipments? They’re not just guns. They’re people.”

---

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Fall of Orion

The next week was smoke and chaos. A Contra convoy ambushed, a radio transmission intercepted, and the CIA’s own pilots suddenly listed as casualties. Connie leaked documents through an old journalist contact in Panama—one story that would later echo as the Iran-Contra Affair.

Before the Agency could silence her, she vanished again—like she had in the jungle. John’s plane exploded over the Gulf of Fonseca. Official reports said “engine failure.” She knew better.

---

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Woman Who Knew Too Much

By ’89, the Berlin Wall was falling, and everyone pretended history was ending. But in the quiet corners of Langley, they still whispered her name like a ghost story.

A Senate committee reviewed boxes of redacted files, and a single phrase kept recurring in the margins:
Consultant: C. L. Jones. Status—Unverified.

---

EPILOGUE

The Desert Never Forgets

Back in Rosamond, California, a woman with a limp and a wide-brim hat walked the desert trails at sunset. She carried no weapon, no identification, just a radio that caught strange frequencies—numbers, voices, fragments of a world still burning quietly.

She lived near the old Edwards flight path. Some nights she’d look up and see test planes slicing the dark, the way secrets cut through history.

Once, a child asked her what she used to do.
“I kept bad men honest,” she said.
The child frowned. “Did it work?”

She smiled. “For a while.”

The wind moved through the creosote bushes, carrying the scent of dust and jet fuel. Somewhere far off, a distant hum—an aircraft nobody admitted existed.

Consuelo Jones closed her eyes, the desert warm around her, and listened.

CONSUELO JONES - PART ONE - A Short Story By Kenneth Howard Smith

 CONSUELO JONES

A SHORT STORY BY KENNETH HOWARD SMITH
— refreshed, smoothed, and dressed in 1940s Hollywood noir —

PROLOGUE — THE LONG GOODBYE BEFORE THE GUNS

They called it a war because wars brought budgets and banners and men with medals who liked to be thanked in public. It began, like many of the good stories, with a small thing that wouldn’t stop growing: a corner of the border where cheap weed and cheap guns moved across the line like a rumor. Then the rumor learned how to organize—money, muscle, men in uniforms who took a second look at their paychecks—and it moved on to swallowing cities. By the time the governors met in the Rockies, the problem wasn’t smuggling anymore; it was a country unraveling at both seams.

In the thick corridors of the Pentagon, General Fred Smith kept his desk lamp burning late and his throat a little raw from the briefings. He had watched wars from behind maps five times over, and he’d learned the arithmetic of urgency: if you wanted things to move, give them a name and a person. When the Homeland committee asked for options, the Joint Chiefs’ databases coughed up one odd, dusty thing: a war-college thesis written by a young 2nd Lieutenant with a temperament like a desert wind—Consuelo Louise Jones. It was titled, bluntly, “Project Santa Ana Hidalgo.” It read like the kind of crazy plan officers toss off when sleep is a smokescreen for imagination—and like the kind of crazy plan that fits exactly the contours of a crisis.

She had written it in the late seventies, a skinny lieutenant with more questions than avenues. They’d mocked it then. It wound up in the bottom drawer of the war college archive, given the “Kerry Dale” award for dizzy audacity. Now, with governors muttering about secession and a drug cartel holding a capital like a prize, somebody in an office with a lot of pull decided the old paper deserved a modern hand. The author lived quietly in a modest condominium, the shape of her life folded neat as a burial flag above the mantelpiece.

On her forty-fifth birthday, Major Consuelo Jones—reserve, scientist of caves, programmer for old languages, desert-born and a little stubborn—was roughed awake by a knock that sounded like an iron fist. Two Air Force agents at the door, then a voice on speaker like a summons from a different life: “Colonel Jones. The president needs you.” They gave her a promotion in two sentences and borrowed her for a war that smelled like smoke and money and ruin.

CHAPTER ONE — THE WOMAN WHO KNEW THE DESERT

Rosamond called itself small by the map’s standards and enormous by the sky’s. In that high desert Claustrophobics of asphalt and rumor, Consuelo learned most of what she was. Her childhood was a sequence of star-bent nights and afternoons full of things that crawled and hid—caves where blind fish made their slow, patient lives, archaeological trenches that smelled of dust and history, and the hush of secret airstrips where hulking STOL planes took off like bullets into heat mirages.

Her father taught her the economy of kindness—offer a drink, offer a ride, show a stranger the shape of home—and the first time she ever learned that power could be anonymous, it was in a hum of propellers and the stiff courtesy of cabin attendants. The old man who’d taken a canteen and left in a plane with no goodbye had had an ancestry in rumor; she never forgot the small human gamble of offering a cup of water and watching a life tilt minutely toward grace.

Connie—Connie Jones to the people who loved her and Major Jones to the brass—grew into a woman who held two different kinds of hands at once: the patient, practical hands that fixed radios and taught old men how to hold their spoons, and the cold, calculating hands that could coax a machine into telling the truth. She was a whiz with the early computer languages, a translator of machines, the kind of person who loved a problem because it forced the world to show its seams.

Her thesis at the War College had been a map of fractures and a plan for gluing them back together. “Santa Ana Hidalgo” was not a love letter to invasion. It was a meticulous list: lines of supply, pockets of local resistance, psychological operations for a population already skittish from fear. The class had laughed. The country would later need someone who wrote her plans like prayers.

CHAPTER TWO — THE KINGS, THE CARTEL, AND THE ROAD TO NO RETURN

Pablo Lujan’s hacienda sat high where sea and land argued. He smoked Cuban cigars like vows and looked at recordings of his own violence the way other men looked at war movies—satisfied, a little bored, impressed with the choreography of terror. He had ways to make witnesses disappear and ways to make deputies look away. He had statesmen on payroll and poor boys on call. He’d learned, the hard way, that fear purchases complicity as cleanly as any wire transfer.

In the foothills of power, governors ruminated in private on what the federal government would not do. To them, the president’s caution was a kind of cowardice, a bureaucratic indecision that left their sheriffs’ deputies dead and their towns hollowed. They came to the Colorado meeting with private jets and private resentments. They left with a fragile agreement: patience, anger, threats. The federal solicitor begged for time. Sanchez, the governor from Texas, had a shorter fuse and a longer memory of bullets.

Meanwhile, Special Agent Manuela Ortega, working in the President’s Daily Briefings, found her finger pausing over “Project Santa Ana Hidalgo.” She had been a room-mate once to a young lieutenant who wrote like she meant it. When Ortega’s fingers found the old title, her pulse picked up as though it had remembered an old tune. She could see the classroom, the thin young woman in the back with her dark glasses. “Consuelo Jones,” she breathed, tasting the past and its peculiar arithmetic of debts.

CHAPTER THREE — THE PENTAGON NIGHT

The Pentagon after midnight is a place where light and shadow bargain. Colonel Jones stood before General Smith like a woman who had half-expected to be called at any hour. He offered her a desk, a file, and a rank. He offered her a war whose edges were already sharp. He wore his authority like an old uniform. When he told her the president had upgraded her clearances and rank, it was not for the medals; it was the work he wanted done.

“You wrote a plan once,” he said softly, as if naming a child. “Now I need that mind.”

She read the file like a person who read maps for a living—slow and intense, shading in the future with ink. The country’s borders were porous in ways that felt personal; there were hideouts and followers and men who had learned to profit from disorder. The United States had the military, the money, and—for the first time in years—an administration willing to speak of extraordinary measures in ordinary rooms.

Jones knew the desert too well to romanticize it. She also knew how planning could become a litany, how a good operation was a fragile algebra of timing, deceit, and small kindnesses. She had been a student and a teacher of contingency. “Santa Ana Hidalgo” in her hands would be less a blunt instrument than a scalpel.

CHAPTER FOUR — SHADOWS IN THE CLIFFS

The places where plans are born are seldom cheering rooms. They are back rooms, airfields at dusk, diners where men sip coffee until the coffee tastes like a conspiracy. Consuelo assembled a team like a director choosing actors: an old pilot who knew STOL fields by sound, a linguist who spoke regional dialects as if they were lullabies, a tech with fingers stained from solder and late-night code. Manuela Ortega slid in like an old friend with new authority; General Smith, the sober eye. They worked with a map that was a palimpsest: federal jurisdiction on top, the cartography of cartel domains underneath, and in the margins the private fiefdoms of governors.

There were things that motioned like ghosts around them: the governors’ pet projects of secession, the President’s insistence on a cautious posture, a national media that loved a scandal more than victory. Above all, there was Pablo Lujan, who sat on a cliff of impunity and felt the law like a mosquito bite. Against him the government could throw men, ships, and satellites; against his kind you needed better: infiltration, understanding of local loyalties, a willingness to play dirty in order to stop dirtier deeds.

CHAPTER FIVE — THE NIGHT THE DESERT HUNG ITS BREATH

They moved at moonrise. Planes that had once been used for emergencies slid silently off private strips and though the flight paths were mapped, the air was thin enough to carry secrets. Consuelo’s hands were steady as she watched the readouts and listened to the tiny voices in the headsets. It was a thing of meticulous cruelty—convincing people that they had choices until the choice was gone.

They did not find heroes at first. They found small resistances—a teacher who would not sign papers, a deputy who had been paid once too often and looked ashamed, a boy who had been promised a life and got bullets. They stitched together a net of people with small grudges and large grievances. They hid their intentions in shipments of tractors and medicine. They learned to talk like locals and to smile like strangers.

Pablo Lujan learned about the operation like any man learns of a leak: eventually and angrily. He sent men, then paid men, and the bodies started to pile in roadside ditches. The press smelled the blood and called it a federal suppression. Governors bristled, and the White House’s patience thinned.

CHAPTER SIX — THE FALL AND THE PRICE

At the last, war is arithmetic without mercy. There was a raid at dawn, a hacienda that had once been a postcard now a shattered picture. Lujan realized too late that the people he thought were entirely his were not. A general’s quiet patience, that of a woman who had spent her life reading caves and machines, and a linguist who could talk a man into betraying his own name—they combined like a cut to wind.

Lujan did not go quietly. His fall made headlines that the governors used for their own fear, and the streets filled with angry men. There were funerals and congratulations, a president who could finally say he had acted, and a debate in the halls about precedents and powers. Consuelo Jones sat with the shape of the thing she had helped make—its victories, its moral grayness, its seams—and she thought of the men who gave their lives and the women who had to explain the price.

EPILOGUE — THE DESERT REMAINS

The desert remembers what is done on its skin. It keeps secrets in the shapes of dunes and the memory of footfalls. Consuelo returned to a quiet that was both blessed and haunted. They called her hero; men wrote speeches with her name folded into the middle. But the desert taught her the long view: that power that solves one thing often births another question; that kindness offered matters more than signature programs; that plans, however brilliant, always meet the unpredictable animal of human will.

There were lines drawn on maps and lines drawn in hearts. The governors kept their resentment; the federal government gained a precedent; the cartels fractured into different shades of criminal enterprise, some more cunning, some more vicious. Pablo Lujan’s fall was a triumph shouted across television rooms, but it was also a lesson, learned in money and blood, that force is only part of any solution.

Consuelo Jones placed her hands on the folded flag above her fireplace and remembered a man who drank from a canteen and vanished into a plane. She thought of Howard Hughes’ rumored ghost farms and of the nights she had listened to secret aircraft tear the heat sky. She thought, as she often did, of the long slow work of keeping a country civil: not only by muscle or law, but by the quiet economies of decency.

Outside, the desert stretched in indifferent splendor. Above, the stars kept company. Inside, a woman who had been a student and a soldier, a programmer and a cave-climber, sat with a war-plan that had become real and a life that had been marked by what she had chosen to do. For an instant, she let the day fold into the long desert night and knew she had been brave; she also knew the world would ask her to be brave again.

And so, in the slow, black theater of the West, the story of Consuelo Jones drew to a hush—a woman with a map of the future in her hand, who had walked through smoke and politics and still knew the small miracles of offering a stranger a drink. The guns had not ended everything; they had only changed the way people listened.

Kenneth Howard Smith - THE GREEN LINE - CHAPTER 011

THE GREEN LINE – CHAPTER XI
By Kenneth Howard Smith
Produced for SDC Audiobooks, a division of SDC OmniMedia Group

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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.

Kenneth Howard Smith - THE GREEN LINE - CHAPTER 010

THE GREEN LINE – CHAPTER TEN
By Kenneth Howard Smith

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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.”

Kenneth Howard Smith - THE GREEN LINE - CHAPTER 006

 

THE GREEN LINE – CHAPTER SIX
By Kenneth Howard Smith
Produced for SDC Audiobooks, a unit of SDC Omni Media Group

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The year was 1881, a time when the sky over Kansas still opened wide enough to swallow a man whole and spit him out a dreamer. Colonel Thomas Courtney Green—Tom Green to those who dared call him friend—stepped down from the gleaming steps of his new locomotive and pressed his boot into the ochre dust of South Abilene. The telegraph wire had found him that morning, a sharp rattle through the Western Union substation, snapping him from the pride of his accomplishment into a quiet, measured awe. His dream—the Green Line—had arrived.

The steam hissed around him, curling white against the black iron flank of his new train, an obsidian serpent built in Chicago’s finest yards. They said these engines could pull seventy miles an hour—faster than wind, faster than the ghosts of the plains. The private cars gleamed deep emerald, trimmed in gold lettering that spelled simply Green Line. Behind them rolled the dining cars, the sleeping cars, and forty freight flats loaded with lumber, machine parts, and the raw bones of a dozen new towns.

South Abilene was barely more than a plan sketched in dirt and dream. But the air hummed with hammer blows, shouts, and the clang of rail iron. Three hundred men were already at work raising walls, laying streets, shaping the skeleton of a town that, only months before, had been scrubland and buffalo trail.

Out past the rail yards, a well gushed muddy water into a new basin. Green’s engineers—clever young men from Boston and St. Louis—had sunk windmills with great vaned arms that spun lazily in the prairie wind, pumping the earth’s veins until the mud cleared and a lake took form. Within weeks, the pond glittered like a sapphire, grass growing thick at its edges. Children would someday skip stones across that water, never knowing it began as nothing but ambition.

Colonel Green wasn’t alone that morning. He’d shared the last leg of his journey with a man equally made of legend and controversy—General George Armstrong Custer, silver-haired now, proud as ever. He was bound west again, chasing orders to “tame” the territories. Green had argued with him over whiskey in the dining car. He believed progress didn’t need a rifle—it needed rail, water, and schools. Custer disagreed.

When the train doors opened, soldiers led their horses down the ramp into the bright morning, the iron smell of gun oil mixing with the scent of fresh-cut pine from the freight cars. South Abilene, Green’s first true hub, came alive in that hour.

From there, his rail would stretch north to Jordan, Nebraska Territory—120 miles of prairie yet to be claimed by iron.

Green’s chief engineer, Emilio Sánchez, had already begun the work. Sánchez was a master architect, born in Havana, trained in Boston under the Greens’ own company. Years ago, he’d designed Hattie Green’s streetcar lines—those same shining rails that stitched the East Coast’s great cities together. Now, he stood out on the plains again, sunburned and grinning, ready to do for Kansas what he’d once done for Boston.

Using new hydraulic systems and prefabricated track sections, his crew could lay twenty miles of line in just two days. Within three weeks, the first train rolled into the makeshift junction at Jordan, where a new city hall and a small “moving picture” theater already stood—Nickelodeons, they called them. Children gawked at the flickering shadows on the white cloth screen, not knowing they were witnessing the first whisper of a new century.

Each town along the Green Line followed the same model: a post office, a library, a courthouse, a school large enough for two hundred children, and—Colonel Green’s personal insistence—a baseball diamond.

He saw in baseball a language every man could speak, from Boston banker to Kansas farmer. The Green Line became not only a railroad, but a living artery of America’s heart, pumping out homes, schools, and fields where young boys learned to hit and run and dream.

And yes, across the tracks—because there were always tracks to cross—stood the red-light district. Saloon girls and gamblers, whiskey and piano music, a place where men could lose a week’s pay or their pride. Green didn’t judge it; he simply made sure it stayed across the line. Every town needs its shadow to know where the light begins.

The line pushed on, linking new settlements like beads on a steel string:
South Abilene → Jordan → Arrington Falls → Sagebush → Manila Gulch → Twin Hills → Ashford → Duran Pier → Point Springs → Garland Hills → Crystal Springs.

At Crystal Springs, near El Paso, the Green Line made its great U-turn—a loop so wide it formed a natural basin. Inside that circle, Green built another town, near identical to South Abilene, a mirror image of ambition. From there, his trains could roll east or west, distributing goods, people, and promise.

And soon, the map grew dense with life. New side rails branched west to towns like Acton Heights and Rosenman, where cotton fields rippled white under the sun. Northward lay Bishop Town, Griswold, Pastor, Reagan, and Los Gears—each tied into the grand circuit, forty miles apart, four towns per loop, trains running opposite directions in perfect rhythm.

Every whistle that echoed over the prairie marked another small victory for progress.

But the Green Line was more than track and timetables. It was the culmination of a legacy. It was the echo of Hannah’s son, Edwin Truman Green—the child born of scandal in a Boston house decades earlier—now a man of vision and unshakable will. He carried his father’s name and his mother’s courage, bridging two worlds that history had tried to keep apart.

And as the locomotives roared westward, slicing through the heart of the frontier, they carried with them the pulse of a nation learning how to grow—town by town, heart by heart—along the shining promise of the Green Line.

Kenneth Howard Smith - THE GREEN LINE - CHAPTER 005

THE GREEN LINE – CHAPTER 005
By Kenneth Howard Smith

The wind over Abilene carried a smell of creosote, dust, and new iron—an odor that meant progress to some and trouble to others. The year was 1872, and a young Army Colonel by the name of Edward Trudeau Green stood beside a fresh stretch of track that shimmered in the afternoon sun. His boots were caked in red clay, his hat brim shadowing the sharp eyes of a man who’d been given a dream too large to be ordinary—a dream born from the wealth and will of his mother, Hattie Robinson Roland Green.

Hattie had a way of seeing things other folks couldn’t. When she bought the unfinished Sunline Railroad for pennies on the dollar during one of the many economic downturns, she saw not just rails and timber, but a spine of steel that could connect forgotten towns, stir up trade, and give her son something more than privilege: purpose.

And so, the Sunline became the Green Line, 1,500 miles of potential running through the heart of the American West, from Abilene, Kansas, to El Paso, Texas, with congressional approval already inked for another 1,500 miles in feeder routes.

Edward Green wasn’t a man content to sit in parlors or ride carriages through Boston. He’d seen the plains before—ridden with surveyors, eaten campfire beans, and listened to the wind sing through canyon passes. So when his mother handed him the deeds and the federal permissions that made the railroad his to finish, he didn’t hesitate.

He came west with engineers, carpenters, laborers, and a vision: to build not just a railroad, but a civilization strung along its length like beads on a cord.

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Each stop along the Green Line would be more than a depot—it would be a full town, every 30 miles apart, in accordance with federal railway code. Colonel Green took that rule and turned it into art.

Every town would have:

• A school complex—elementary through high school—for up to 3,000 students.

• A church, because no community could grow without faith or gathering.

• A hospital, small but proud, two stories of red brick and white shutters, with enough beds to serve the town’s births, fevers, and heartbreaks.

• A bank, the Premier City Bank, rescued by Elizabeth Green, Edward’s brilliant sister, from near collapse and now reborn as a regional lifeline.

• A strip of shops, designed around the railway loop—a saloon, a café, a barber, a tailor, and a few general stores.

• And at the center of every settlement, an oval rail turnaround with a grand structure rising beside it—a combination hotel and casino, with polished oak floors and a piano bar that played until the lamps burned low.

This, Edward said, would be America’s promise on rails.

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South Abilene was the first of these. It was the test.

He had his engineers draw out a circle of track where his trains could turn and refuel, and within that circle he built what no railroad man before had imagined: a town shaped by the railroad itself.

The Green Line Hotel rose from prairie dust within months—stone quarried from nearby hills, its veranda lined with white columns and rocking chairs. Across from it, a restaurant and dance hall, where cowhands and travelers could get a plate of stew and listen to a fiddler from New Orleans play songs that reminded them of home.

To the east, he built a schoolyard, complete with a track and field—a novelty in those days—and something rarer still: a baseball diamond, built to the exact specifications used by the Boston Red Stockings and New York Mutuals. Wooden bleachers circled the field, lit at night by rows of gas lamps that hissed and glowed like watchful eyes.

“Folks will come to see this,” Edward said to his foreman, Caleb Dorsey, a wiry man with coal-black hair and a pipe that never left his jaw.
“See what, sir?”
“The future,” Edward replied.

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And people did come. Farmers from the nearby plains brought their families to watch the Green Line teams play ball on weekends. Shopkeepers set up lemonade stands. Children laughed in the streets while locomotives whistled in the background.

It wasn’t just industry—it was hope.

For the first time, towns that had been nothing but lonely dots on a map found themselves connected to the pulse of the nation. Cotton from Texas reached Chicago. Beef from the Panhandle reached New York. Families that had never dreamed of leaving the prairie now boarded trains to see the Gulf or the mountains.

Each small station became a world of its own—some proud, some wild, all alive.

In one of the westernmost towns, Silver Junction, a young schoolteacher named Hannah Leigh took the post at one of Colonel Green’s new schools. She had come from Boston herself, not knowing that Edward’s mother once employed a Hannah of her own—a handmaid who had changed the Green family’s destiny. The symmetry wasn’t lost on Edward. He watched this new Hannah with quiet admiration. Her way with the children, her steadiness in the face of hardship, reminded him of what made people endure.

He began to visit the school often, at first to deliver books, then to share lunch, then just to hear her talk. Their friendship grew like the towns themselves—quiet, deliberate, and full of unseen roots.

She taught him that building railroads wasn’t just about laying track. It was about laying trust. Each tie and spike connected lives as much as land.

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By 1875, the Green Line was not merely a railroad; it was a moving heartbeat of America. The President himself called it “the private miracle of public necessity.”

And in that miracle, Colonel Green found something deeper than commerce—he found belonging.

The towns thrived. Schools filled. The banks prospered. The trains ran on time. Baseball games lit the twilight. And through it all, somewhere between Abilene and El Paso, the soft voice of a schoolteacher and the vision of a family born from scandal and steel merged into one lasting truth:

That love and purpose could build nations just as surely as rails could bind them.